Performative Images: A Philosophy of Video Art Technology in France 9789048550289

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction. Video: Between Technology and Performance
1. Volume-Image of Video Technology
2. Zones of Modulation: Video as a Space-Critical Medium
3. Programmed Life and Racialized Technesis
4. Video and the Technological Milieu of Desire
Conclusion. Performative Images as Objects of Philosophical Inquiry
Artworks Cited
Acknowledgements
Index

Citation preview

Performative Images

For Reine

Performative Images A Philosophy of Video Art Technology in France

Anaïs Nony

Amsterdam University Press

The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, the Winthrop-King Institute at Florida State University, the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape and the Govan Mbeki Research & Development Centre at the University of Fort Hare. All credit for DHET purposes for this book is attributed to the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class at the University of Johannesburg.

Cover illustration: Yalter, Nil. 1974. La Femme sans tête ou La Danse du ventre. Video tape: 24 min., black and white, sound. Cover design: Kok Korpsershoek Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 282 7 e-isbn 978 90 4855 028 9 doi 10.5117/9789463722827 nur 670 © Anaïs Nony / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.



Table of Contents

Introduction 7 Video: Between Technology and Performance

1. Volume-Image of Video Technology

47

2. Zones of Modulation: Video as a Space-Critical Medium

79

3. Programmed Life and Racialized Technesis 109 4. Video and the Technological Milieu of Desire

141

Conclusion 171 Performative Images as Objects of Philosophical Inquiry

Artworks Cited

177

Acknowledgements 185 Index 187

Connected and separated at once, forward while turning back, gliding into the future while standing awkwardly in the past, the historian of the contemporary flails about and falters. – Jane Blocker 1 To weigh the future of future thoughts requires some powerfully visionary thinking about how the life of the mind can operate in a moral context increasingly dangerous to its health. – Toni Morrison 2 Culture and technique cannot be complementary in a static position; they may only become so through a cinematic process of tilting and inversion under a regime whose appropriation to each issue is perhaps the most important task that philosophy’s effort could propose to attend to. – Gilbert Simondon3

1 2 3

Blocker 2015, p. 4. Morrison 2019, p. 116. Simondon 2014, p. 329.

Introduction Video: Between Technology and Performance Abstract: In the introduction to this book, I engage video art and activist practices to understand how they confront and modulate the effects of image technologies on contemporary life. By means of the concept of the “performative image,” I present a new regime of the image with the qualities of operation. I define the performative dimension of video technology as its capacity to act as an agent of reality. This introduction presents a methodology founded in performance studies and the philosophy of technology to show how video technologies are shaping psychic and social life due to the various operations they perform on cultural practices and historical realities. Keywords: activism, art, installation, performance, technology, video

No longer the passive objects of traditional art history, artworks now figure as performative forces to which are attributed heightened capacities for action. – Ina Blom 1 Interpretation is first and foremost a form of making: that is, it depends on the willed intentional activity of the human mind, molding and forming the objects of its attention with care and study. – Edward W. Said 2

Video Practices of Knowledge and Technology You are on the C train near Paris—the yellow line. You know you are going to a wealthy suburb because the train is here on time and there are still 1 Blom 2016, p. 13. 2 Said 1997, p. 164.

Nony, A., Performative Images: A Philosophy of Video Art Technology in France. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463722827_intro

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covers on the chairs and see-through windows to contemplate nature while you ride. You hold on to your train ticket and your professional invitation. You also have your self-written authorization explaining why you are on this trip. If some surveillance agent asks, you have a speech ready in your head. You can explain why it is an essential activity to go see Kitso Lynn Lelliott’s video installations in Chamarande. It is March 2021, and the French government is prescribing what counts as an essential activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. You are on your way nevertheless, and an hour into the ride you arrive and walk the village-like streets. You enter the Domaine Départemental de Chamarande—a park with a seventeenth-century castle. A sign on the Orangerie cottage building and an open door invites you into a dark room. A woman sitting at her desk is expecting you and asks to scan your QR-code. You observe the space while she reminds you of the sanitary measures. The work is here: Fungible Things (2015), My story no doubt is me/ Older than me (2015), I was her and she was me and those we might become (2016), and Untitled Sankofa 1 (2016). The space feels like an intimate retrospection of Lelliott’s work. You start walking. You don’t yet know where to go but the images floating in space are welcoming. The different components of Kitso Lynn Lelliott’s work resemble a palimpsest where temporalities, geographies, languages, and bodily presences are assembled to immerse you, the viewer, in concomitant narratives about history, knowledge, and technology. The layers of screen dress-up the room to fashion the space with the transparent ghost-like figures that are often present in Lelliott’s work. In Lelliot’s videos, her body performs the reminiscent manifestation of history: exhibiting layers of experience in space and creating a suggestive afterlife in the aftermath of colonial times. Lelliott’s approach to video technology, by which I am most captivated, is in evidence in her figures. They inhabit the screens and the space in between screens, on the threshold of appearance and disappearance, simultaneously present and absent in the name of art. Carrying forward figures from the past, such as Alzire, servant at the court of Frederique Sophie Wilhelmine of Prussia or Margravine of Bayreuth, eldest daughter of the King of Prussia Frederick William I and sister of Frederick II of Prussia, Lelliott’s video works reveal historical narratives in everyday gestures. In I was her and she was me and those we might become, Lelliott dresses and undresses herself, staging her body as both the form and the substance of the video performance, uncovering herself as if she was peeling away layers of identity that variably occupy the frame. Lelliott plays with images of herself and with the screen to create various modes of existence. The texture is created not only by the white cotton dress she often uses in her work, but also by the screen itself

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which ambivalently disappears to be replaced by projections of floating particles, or by translucid structures where multiple versions of Lelliott can be seen. As a viewer, you both wander in space and wonder about Lelliott. Not simply because she is a dear friend, but because you get to see her for all the other people she could have been and might still become. Lelliott’s work gives space and time to an embodied wholeness: a myriad of presences that are no longer damned to be separated by the hegemonic system of knowledge imposed by imperial countries, such as France. Presented in Chamarande where a castle was built in 811 and became, in the sixteenth century, a lordly hotel for François Miron, prévôt des marchands de Paris and close friend of Henri IV, Lelliott’s work reactivates the site where the installation is presented—a site where money, power, and sovereignty consumed other modalities of existence. In Untitled Sankofa 1, the screen and the viewer inhabit the space and belong to a common sky, which Lelliott achieves through her use of video technology. Closer to this screen-based installation, you feel a wholeness as if you have stepped into a world where other cosmologies are at play. And they are. The star-map of Nineveh, a 5,500-year-old Sumerian clay tablet that is the earliest known astronomical instrument, is reproduced and performs the skylines of celestial times in the space of the installation. The celestial planisphere, still the property of the British Museum in 2022, depicts the constellation and represents an instrument of calculation. As a viewer, you are immersed in the sky of January 3–4, 650 BC as seen over the old town of Nineveh in Mesopotamia. As you circulate within the space and discover the various modalities of seeing Lelliott’s performative figures on screen, the universe of ancient technology encounters the multichannel video exhibition to produce an imaginary engulfment. Not quite a reversal and not so much an immersion, the engulf ing quality of Lelliott’s work creates a world out of worldly presences that perform a cultural critique of hegemonic time technology. The space engulfs you to tell a story concerned with fragments of history in search of wholeness. Lelliott’s 2021 exhibition at Chamarande, made of sounds, cotton balls, wooden boxes, screens, and projections created a time outside of the pandemic, outside of the sovereignty of governance; a time where epistemologies of presence and absence could perform the other lives of the image.3 As a viewer, you walk out of Lelliott’s space in slow motion, in an attempt to attune yourself to the subtle and almost invisible variations of belonging to subversive practices of knowledge and technology. 3

See Hayes and Gilburt 2020.

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Performative Images of Video Technology I begin with Lelliott’s video installations because they illustrate the performative dimension of video technology: its capacity to offer alternative narratives about experience. Lelliott’s work in particular demonstrates how the performative dimension of video images can activate the continuum of behaviour, practice, observation, and social advocacies that are central to the cultural critique of representational practices and technology. Lelliott’s performative practice of making video through disappearance and dissolution is central to this book’s argument: video technology performs images that act as agents of knowledge. In the memorably obsessive reflections that comprise Jacques Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy,” which highlights the ambivalent power of writing as remembrance and forgetting, this technology of knowledge constitutes the ineradicable paradox of language. 4 And, of course, at least in the myth of writing he refers to, Derrida highlights the techno-epistemological dimension of writing as a knowledge technology. Admittedly though, my concerns in Performative Images are not with the whole of this debate on knowledge and technology. Inevitably, perhaps, I have a somewhat narrower focus than this: namely, the technology of video, the infiltration of video images in contemporary societies, and the effects of video operations on both psychic and social life. What interests me about this technology (both analogue and digital) is above all its aesthetic capacity to signal a shift in the structuring and diffusion of knowledge where images perform operations intrinsic to the material intelligence of computation, capital, and governance.5 Video is taken in this book as a distinctive new medium6 that is both a technical object with various sets of usages and practices and a historical reality: meaning that video technology contains implicit information about societies.7 At one level, my central concern in Performative Images is with video or, rather, with the lived experience of video technology: the technological transition between analogue and digital moving-image technologies and their infiltration of our contemporary life. It seems to me that video, as a means of performing interactions in psychic and social contexts, questions when images do things to our brain, to our sense of belonging, and to our relation to past events and future narratives. At the core of this study is the 4 5 6 7

See Derrida 1981. See Baranzoni 2017. Jameson 1991, p. xv. Simondon 2014, p. 29.

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identification of a new regime of the image, which I have termed performative images, with the qualities of operation that define the performative dimension of video technology: its capacity to operate as an agent of reality. At stake are the types of implicit information video objects can produce, the kind of attention they require, and the mode of bodily disposition they depend upon. Video, understood as an agent, can be attributed a capacity to act on the message it transmits to the receiver and on the situation in which the images are perceived. I argue in the book that video technology modulates the socio-cultural zones of knowledge and of historical reality by implementing various operations (transduction, contestation, anticipation) within our contemporary environment. By performative images, I am referring to operations and utterances transmitted by video technology—both analogue and digital—that “put into effect the relation that they name.”8 The goal is not to discuss performance art per se but to address how the “interpellative power”9 of speech is transformed into the pre-emptive power of video technology.10 Contrary to language, which sustains the body by interpellating it, video technology captures the body through various time-based operations. It is a technology that solicits the body by the distribution of its image; it seizes its presence by the myriad of interfaces that perform around the body; and it transforms its data into a-significative units11 that can be used against the body. In other words, the question of the performative dimension of the image is not only different from those of language (as acts and utterances), but video technology also requires the revaluation of critical tools to unpack the disruptive dimension of contemporary media technology.12 At another level, I am convinced that it is urgent not to oppose analogue and digital technologies. Rather I see, in the decades-long genealogy of their evolution, an opportunity to interrogate how image objects operate relationships between cultural practices and historical realities. I take the object of video as my philosophical occasion, so to speak, to elaborate a sensibility for images with the quality of operation. Mental images are inhabited by image objects that survive, as Didi-Huberman would say, in the fragile and intermittent realm of the psychic mind.13 An image object is an object with an afterglow effect; it belongs to the realm of fantasies and the 8 9 10 11 12 13

Butler 1993, p. 224. Butler 1999, p. 2. See Hansen 2015b; Massumi 2007. Rouvroy cited in Rouvroy and Stiegler 2016, p. 8. See Stiegler 2016. See Didi-Huberman 2002.

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often-hallucinatory dimension of thought.14 This effect is best understood as intermittently enacting both rémanence (property of being remanent even when the actual cause is gone) and permanence (property of being enduring); 15 namely, modes of relating to past and present experiences. Much like the mind, video technology can produce not only projections of alternative reality in the present, but it can also create anticipation of a future reality by means of technological experimentation. By bringing different temporal realms into the synthesis of its object, video technology significantly challenges conceptions of time in relation to moving-image technology. Here, the technicity of the video object and its mode of exis­ tence creates forms of spatio-temporal expression that grant access to the performative movement taking place between experience and imagination as well as between cultural practices and historical realities. Technological supports, be they a writing pad (as seen in chapter 1) or the virtual presence of an object in video images (as seen in chapter 3), always indicate a modulation of reality by the presence of media objects. Such a presence has morphed into a prégnance (property of being a perceptive structure): that which imposes an image object to be constituted in the mental apparatus of the subject. This prégnance of the analogue-digital video image is what transforms the traditional mode of representation (as seen in painted images) and the programmatic quality of the technical realm (as seen in photography) into the operative realm that Vilém Flusser defines as modelling relations to the real.16 The book argues that the advent of portable video technology in the late 1960s and its almost complete infiltration into increasingly mediatized societies has shaped the structure and operation of bodily experience according to new sets of imagery principles. I position the study of video (as image and apparatus) to better address the impact of technology on memory, the spatial modulation of subjectivities, the importance of video technology in the context of the increased surveillance of racialized bodies, and the technology-driven dimensions of desire. The performative dimension of video is important to address because algorithms or, to paraphrase Luciana Parisi, “performing entities“ that restructure modes of existence increasingly run the media-driven milieu we inhabit.17 In the early twenty-first century, 14 On the afterglow in relationship to technology, see Simondon’s “L’effet de halo en matière technique” from 1960 in Simondon 2014, pp. 279–93. 15 Stiegler 1996, p. 166. 16 Flusser 1986, p. 333. 17 Parisi 2013, p. ix.⁠

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not only is video technology found everywhere in social environments, performing diverse realms of reality in our contemporary moment, but the automatic quality of video technology’s operations calls into question notions of desire, politics, and social agency. Furthermore, the omnipresence of video objects (phones, GPSs, watches, tablets, computers, televisions, screen boards) in both private and public spheres of society is structuring the very conditions of knowledge transmission by escalating the digital divide between people through extended platforms of exchange.18 This book tackles the impact of technologies on social and psychic life by looking at selected video works produced over a fifty-year period. Because video technology is constantly developing towards greater complexity, its study demands the revaluation of the conceptual tools needed to unpack the aesthetic and historical conditions of its emergence and dissemination. I engage both performance studies and the philosophy of technique and technology to show that artworks not only contribute to the rethinking of media platforms and networks of knowledge distribution but also to show how artists anticipate the societal and psychic changes brought about by technology. The video works studied in this book promote art as anticipation: artists and activists display an eagerness to tackle the changes occurring in the various layers of society by reclaiming narratives to better address the events shaping their geopolitical landscapes. Art as anticipation is both a form of “confrontation,” to cite a concept Denise Ferreira da Silva coined,19 and a form of “modulation”: an operational mode where reality is revealed and invented anew through alteration, intonation, cadence, and variation. Art as anticipation engages the viewer by confronting them with narratives that have the possibility of an “inflection”20 and by modulating the viewer’s perception to foster differential modes of belonging to knowledge transmission. What guided my impetus to work with these specific video works is their power to signify alternative stories about technology. They show that video’s performative images create a f ield of technicity that reveals sets of interrogations concerning our relation to time, information, embodiment, and history. In video technology, performativity reflects on the potential of the object to operate and develop other modes of engaging with reality. I build on cultural theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s first use of performativity in video art in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. 18 Proctor 2010, p. 35. 19 See Ferreira da Silva 2015, p. 1. 20 Ibid.

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Muñoz was a pioneer in bridging the disciplinary gap between media studies and performance studies by paying attention to identity politics outside of the dominant form of media. In Muñoz’s book, artist Osa Hidalgo de la Riva introduces the potential of video to create alternative and utopian stories, as seen in her Marginal Eyes or Mujeta Fantasy 1. This video from 1996 is a utopian, though no less satirical, remake of sovereignty where Chicanas, Native women, and Black women have ascended to positions of power and taken over both scientific and political domains within the state of California. In de la Riva’s video, a fictional Chicana archaeologist ironically discovers “the origins of Western culture in the form of a small red clay figurine that she unearths during a dig.”21 In a detailed account of the video’s complexity, Muñoz points to its ability to distance itself from the dominant understanding of power, culture, and knowledge and to rewrite history so that “the minoritarian subject’s eyes are no longer marginal.”22 The overall video performs a world that makes the utopian proposition that “it is through the transformative powers of queer sex and sexuality that a queer world is made” by relating to both private and public spheres (e.g., in the scene where the archaeologist rises to fame and in another where she is seen in the context of her queer relationship) and by ending with a sex scene where old footage from US sex-education material is played on TV.23 Though my work does not claim to address the same set of political and cultural questions as Muñoz’s work on queer studies, it relates to Disidentifications to the extent that video becomes a pivotal medium to address other modes of existence and relations to reality. As Muñoz points out, video’s performative power “looks into the past to critique the present and helps imagine the future.”24 This book takes part in the debate about the necessity of situating technique and image technologies in the production and circulation of epistemes by addressing the role of activists, artists, and theorists using video in anticipation of both the “technical” and the “digital” turns taking place in societies. The book understands video technology as producing images made of multi-layered transitions (technical, geopolitical, and social) spanning over several decades from the early 1970s to the present. I take video images as images of transition and transduction more than of transformation, and show how their performative dimension reveals the passage of the 21 Muñoz 1999, p. 23. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 25.

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coming of a technological age. I am interested in telling a story centred on the performative encounter between technique and moving-image aesthetics (video art, video installation, spontaneous video recording, and documentary video-making) to reclaim a different philosophy of image technologies: one that is less concerned with speech and textuality, image and movement, and focuses instead on opaque programmed significance25 and a-significant data.26 I address the performative dimension of video images through museum curations, street protests, experimental research in universities, and technical training in cultural centres to reveal how image technology performs in society. Ultimately, the revaluation of video technology from the standpoint of performative images, as exemplified in installation art and activism, allows for the emergence of historiographical zones of knowledge at the threshold of both technical evolution and sociocultural adaptation. This study situates the aesthetic and political fields of video objects between the early 1970s and the early twenty-first century in France (mainly). I engage in the social, political, but also aesthetic alliances produced by video technology and pay attention to specific video experimentations to account for how moving images create relations in increasingly segregated and yet networked societies. The goal is to retrace a narrative concerning technique and technology that emerged out of the work of Jean-Christophe Averty, Judy Blum, Nicole Croiset, Mona Hatoum, Catherine Ikam, Thierry Kuntzel, Carol Roussopoulos, Zineb Sedira, and Nil Yalter. I also engage video groups such as Collectif Vidéo, Vidéo-Info, Vidéo Out, Vidéo 00, Les Cents Fleurs, VidéoDéba, Liaisons Nouvelles and women-only groups such as Inform’elles, Vidéa, M’Sam, Insoumuses, Vidéodieuses and Vidéoteuses. The corpus of artwork selected in this book is as much disparate in its forms as it is in its content. In situating the video art and activism that was presented in France between the 1970s and the 2020s, my goal is to offer alternative tools, away from a solely filmic approach to the image, to ground a performative moving-image understanding of postmodernism and its links to post-imperialism. By engaging a corpus of moving-image installations made by artists from various horizons, cultures, and nationalities, this book hopes to engage debates concerning the historical understanding of the relation between technology and aesthetics in post-independence France. I study multi-media installation works that were deployed in museum installations and art galleries but also videotapes made during street protests and 25 Flusser 1986, p. 330. 26 Rouvroy in Rouvroy and Stiegler 2016, p. 8.

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within institutions such as the university. I analyse videos’ mode of display, distribution, and the proliferation of their usage to reveal the implications of video objects in shaping both psychic and collective life in a time of historical change and technological transition. By going back to some of the debates launched in the ’70s regarding the relation between video, informatics, and technology, I show how video objects offer a privileged case through which to question how technical environments shape human reality. I pay equal attention to what is happening in the image, what is happening in the space where viewers watch these images, and which distributive networks give video an afterlife. To explore the performative dimension of video technology, each chapter addresses the work of artists and activists to tackle the themes of memory, space, race, and desire. By doing so, the book retraces an aesthetic and theoretical journey in which I bring the reader into the room with the video objects to reveal how video technology perform various operations on contemporary life. This book is not interested in the long genealogy of video experimentations that happened in France, but looks precisely at certain historical, aesthetic, and technological encounters to reveal artistic emergences that have paved the way towards a critique of performance technology. I discuss critiques of history writing via memory technology (chapter 1), video spaces as modulating information (chapter 2), surveillance technology as linked to bodily segregation (chapter 3), and the technological environment as producing new desiring modalities (chapter 4). In focusing on how video produces different social alliances, I hope to engage the norms, forces, and operations that structure political and technological agendas in post-independence France. In the remaining part of this introduction, I engage the historical realities of technological innovations, the importance of video artists in anticipating and confronting historical realities via video technology, and the infiltration of the imaginary modes of connectivity and significations in a world where video images have become a driving force determining communication.

Performative Video Operations Video objects have now become omnipresent in society, challenging categories of knowledge production, embodiment, and history making in new and fundamental ways. In the realm of media studies, questions about how media technology is changing daily life have been the subject of much debate in recent years. Cultural theorists have critiqued media as a technology that

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catches users’ attention in a frenzy of communicative systems;27 they argue that such a flux of signs reveals the poverty of communication itself.28 More recently, media theorists have moved beyond such critiques to engage with behavioural manipulation through technology in order to understand how media implements new modalities of governance.29 Following media theorist Luciana Parisi, the algorithms central to the functioning of media devices are the central forces of cybernetics; they restructure modes of existence according to new sets of indeterminacy.30 Video objects perform diverse tasks to interpret human interactions in terms of quantifiable data flows. For philosopher of law Antoinette Rouvroy, these data flows develop forms of “algorithmic governmentality” that control people according to a-semantic yet calculable signals.31 The constant infiltration of screen-based objects into the various realms of sociality is not new. From the very beginning of the deployment of video recorders in the late 1960s, such objects have shaped the landscape of image making in multiple directions, revealing the power of such technology to reflect upon “the emergence of new social topologies.”32 These topological relations with media technologies (how one deals with the past, makes sense of the present, and projects into the future) intensified with the advent of portable moving-image technologies in the late 1960s. Many decades after the public commercialization of video technologies, anyone can attest to how deeply this medium has infiltrated both our collective and intimate environments. Video technology was overwhelmingly used by women in feminist protest, workers’ unions, queer movements as well as pro-immigrant and refugee movements, because it offered “novelty, autonomy, a total absence of norms, and the opportunity to be trained on the job.”33 However, leading male figures of French theory paid little to no attention to the aesthetic and political force of video experimentations.34 Even when Jean-François Lyotard 27 See Dean 2019; Lovink 2011; Stiegler 2016. 28 See Galloway, Thacker, and Wark 2013; Groys 2012. 29 See Väliaho 2014; Nony 2019. 30 Parisi 2013, p. ix. 31 See Rouvroy and Stiegler 2016, p. 22. 32 Blom 2016, p. 21. 33 Mignot-Lefebvre 1979, p. 92. 34 A few names are worth mentioning here: Régis Debray, who developed the concept of mediology in the 1990s to unpack the intermediary procedures that take place between the production of signs and events; Georges Didi-Huberman, who engaged the question of the spatialized image of the art installation, both practically and theoretically; Félix Guattari, who experimented with radio technologies and theoretically unpacked the challenges brought about by mass media communication; Guy Débord, who wrote a landmark book in 1967 tackling the

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co-curated a multi-media exhibition on the concept of the immaterial at the Centre Pompidou in 1986, very little attention was given to video as providing critical tools to address the new material conditions brought about by our post-modern times. In the exhibition Les Immatériaux, each work of art was divided into different “zones” of aesthetic manifestation. Jean-Louis Boissier, who contributed to the video aspects of the exhibition recalls: Lyotard framed the exhibition with his texts and ideas, he reorganized and renamed much of what was already there and integrated the elements of the exhibition. In fact, he provided the overall narrative for the exhibition in his texts for the catalogue and the exhibition walls. He himself said that his only, but very decisive scenography, or dramaturgic idea, was the use of the soundtrack played via headphones, so that people would walk through the exhibition listening to spoken texts, different in the various zones of the exhibition space on the 5th floor of the Centre Pompidou—so to speak, “listening to Lyotard.”

Though the preparations for the exhibition began in 1981, two years before Lyotard took part in the project, it is still remembered as the “listening to Lyotard” show.35 At the time, Lyotard was faculty at Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Yves Châtelet, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and artists such as ORLAN, Jean-Louis Boissier, and Jean-Paul Fargier. Paris VIII, the so-called Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes, was created in Autumn 1968 and moved to Saint-Denis in 1980. From the beginning, this public university had a video studio run first by technicians and then, starting in 1973, by teachers and students. Video technology is taught at Vincennes, Jussieu, Nanterre, Paris I, and during more informal workshops hosted in Maisons de la culture and Maisons de la jeunesse.36 Despite the fact that video objects have played a central role in questioning the human-machine and culture-technique relations, video experimentations in France have been slow to receive scholarly attention. Scholars cherish French theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, and Jean-François Lyotard for their reflections on notions of mediation, spectatorship, and time as shaping our accumulation of spectacles as shaping our modern condition; Jacques Derrida, who wrote a short text on video artist Gary Hill and addressed how television manipulated and transmitted images that influence notions of democracy and history in his dialogue with Bernard Stiegler. 35 Hui and Broeckmann 2015, pp. 93–94. 36 Mignot-Lefebvre 1979, p. 91.

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post-modern condition. Very much engaged by post-structuralist theorists, these thinkers were all involved, in one way or the other, in undoing (though some would say reproducing) the logocentric tendencies of Western critique. Yet, these critics did not have much to say about the technological experimentations developed by artists and activists using electronic images and video technology at that time. Unlike, for the most part, experimental films, such as the pioneering work of Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, and Jean-Luc Godard, French theorists barely mentioned the political and aesthetic experimentations taking place in Paris and in France more broadly. Despite the fact that video work (as image and as apparatus) has been at the forefront of cultural critique concerning broadcasting technology and television hegemony, on one hand, and the experimental modes of manifesting new ways of belonging to experiences within media-driven realities, on the other, most French theorists’ reflections on media were grounded in the cinematic as defined by the filmic image, thus missing out on more than fifty years of electronic video experimentations that make visible performative images and operative modes of relating to technology. Starting in the late 1960s with the invention of the Portapak camera, which could be carried and operated by one person, video became accessible as an image-making tool to give unrepresented communities, such as factory workers, refugees, and political activists, a media presence. The birth of the video movement in the late 1960s was thus due to affordable tape recorders that could be operated by one person. The emergence of this technical object, as in the case of the Portapak introduced in 1967, restructured the way in which moving images were made and thought on a massive scale. In France, videotape recorders were used to capture street and factory protests as well as to experiment with new means of information, revealing the political potential of video and broadcasting technology to record and relay events independent from mainstream media. At a time when multi-geopolitical struggles for cultural and economic independence were challenging the transcultural foundations of Europe and the United States, people documenting new modes of inventing community turned videos into objects of critical inquiry. Complex experimentations with technologies facilitated debates on surveillance, cybernetics, biology, and social identity across the “electronic spectrum,” to borrow the subtitle of Radical Software, “a grassroots sophisticated how-to” periodical that became a reference in the field of moving-image technology.37 Video technology quickly became a mode of producing and 37 London 2009, p. 199.

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distributing information differently. Using video technology, Black History in the United States was writing itself out of centuries of oppression. The Civil Rights Movement was founded to end discriminatory laws and, thanks to portable cameras, footage of this revolutionary organizing documented speeches, protests, marches, and riots. In France, the video collective Video Out filmed formerly incarcerated author Jean Genet reading a text after the arrest on October 13, 1970, of Black Panther activist Angela Davis. Fearing that his intervention might be censored, Genet asked Swiss feminist and pioneer documentary filmmaker Carole Roussopoulos to accompany him on October 16, 1970, to the television studio of L’invité du Dimanche—a télévision programme that aired on the public television channel Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF) on November 8. Encouraged by Genet in 1969, Roussopoulos was the first woman to buy a Portapak in France—the second person after Jean-Luc Godard. During the interview, Genet read an anti-racist pamphlet that criticized police violence in the United States.38 As Genet predicted, his intervention was never aired. Roussopoulos’s tape Jean Genet parle d’Angela Davis (8 min., 1970) became the first activist video produced in France. It also stands, as Ros Murray points out, as a “testament to video’s opposition to television.”39 As early as the 1970s in France, video became a tool for artists, activists, and citizen journalists to disrupt dominant epistemologies. The critical disruption of mainstream information, as seen in the work of Jean-Christophe Averty, who questions the political role of state television, became a central motive for video pioneers. 40 For artists such as Catherine Ikam, Nil Yalter, and Zineb Sedira, video was a means by which to reclaim forms of knowledge production at a time when the geopolitical landscape of post-WWII was infused by colonial trauma, the cold war, and the failed promise of economic stability. In the work of Ikam, Yalter, and Sedira, the object of video is deployed for both its imaging and spatial potential. The video object became a means through which to think about the broadcasted images 38 During the first take, Genet addressed the audience by reading a text, which included these lines: “Angela Davis est dans vos pattes. Tout est en place. Vos flics—qui ont déjà tiré sur un juge de façon à mieux tuer trois Noirs—, vos flics, votre administration, vos magistrats s’entraînent tous les jours et vos savants aussi, pour massacrer les Noirs. D’abord les Noirs. Tous. Ensuite, les Indiens qui ont survécu. Ensuite, les Chicanos. Ensuite, les radicaux blancs. Ensuite, je l’espère, les libéraux blancs. Ensuite, les Blancs. Ensuite, l’administration blanche. Ensuite, vous-mêmes. Alors le monde sera délivré. Il y restera après votre passage, le souvenir, la pensée et les idées d’Angela Davis et du Black Panther.” http://www.film-documentaire.fr/4DACTION/w_fiche_film/31137_1. 39 Murray 2016, p. 6. 40 Averty 1982, p. 82.

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of the real and to disrupt hegemonic forms of discourse. The goal was not simply to overthrow television’s power but to reflect on it: to stage both the image and the apparatus that video is in order to use it for its potential to generate and invent new modalities for thinking about images in general and the form of thought such video technology provides. 41 First and second-wave feminists engaged in video both as an image and as an apparatus and took video as a tool to question the intersection of race, class, and gender. Along with various other media in the early ’70s that explored societal systems, video was quickly used to question how the structure of information shaped individual and collective knowledge in a society. Austrian video pioneer Valie Export started to use video as a way to critique societal norms. Very much aware of how broadcasting technology (such as television and radio) was linked to the distribution of mainstream ideology, and especially patriarchy, Export broadcast her piece Facing a Family on television in 1971. Facing a Family depicted a family having dinner while watching TV, thus offering a mirror to spectators in their respective living rooms performing the same activity. In France, Roussopoulos used the Portapak to give visibility to migrants, homosexuals, political activists, and sex workers. See for example Roussopoulos’ Prostituées de Lyon parlent, 1975, or the 1973 Enterrement of Mahmoud Al Hamchari, where Roussopoulos filmed the burial of a leader of the Organization for the Liberation of Palestine in France who was killed as a result of a bomb attack in 1972. 42 In the US, video and installation art pioneer Dara Birnbaum created Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman between 1978 and 1979. She appropriated the f igure of Wonder Woman to address the gender bias embedded in north American television series. A few years later, in 1981, multi-media pioneer Beverly Buchanan created Marsh Ruins, which captured the erosion of a temporal land-art sculpture she created in coastal Georgia. Among the many themes this work addresses, those of collective memory and the unmarked histories of enslaved people are central. As Alexxa Gotthardt reports: “Marsh Ruins (1981) [is] located in coastal Georgia near a commemorated site where Confederate poet Sidney Lanier penned his famous work ‘Marshes of Glynn’ (1878). To the east of Buchanan’s work, as a wall label points out, is Saint Simons Island, where a group of Igbo people sold into slavery collectively drowned themselves in 1803. That 41 Dubois 2011, p. 109. 42 Roussopoulos made over one hundred and fifty documentaries and co-founded the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir in 1982 with Delphine Seyrig and Ioana Wieder.

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site, unlike Lanier’s, has no historic marker.”43 By generating the erosion of her own art sculpture, Buchanan creates a site from which to activate the history of the land and of the people who acted on it. The artwork becomes a signifying trace of a place in time that allows for subversive knowledge of history to emerge. 44 In 1984, video pioneer and first African American animator Ayoka Chenzira created Hair Piece: A Film for Nappy-Headed People. This critical satire addressed self-image for African American women who live in a society dominated by racilalized (white) female standards of beauty. In Hair Piece: A Film for Nappy-Headed People, Ayoka Chenzira used multimedia materials to create an alternative discourse on white-centred female beauty norms. By performing other modalities of identifying with dominant understandings of existence, her video creates, engenders, and constitutes the real, differently. In France, video pioneer Thierry Kuntzel created his f irst video installation La Desserte Blanche in 1980, which portrayed a female figure performing tasks in an interior. In this twenty-two-minute-long colour video, later exhibited in a white neon-lit room for the exhibition Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou in 1985, Kuntzel modulated lighting contrasts to whiten the image so much that the light erased the gestures and silhouette of the woman. The latter appears and disappears: finding herself matching the background like the other furniture or the fruit in the basket she often holds in her hands. In his notes, Kuntzel mentioned that the technician misspelled the title of the tape and wrote: “La décepte blanche.”45 The erroneous title is ironically accurate for a video that does not show a desserte (a tray) and portrays instead a female figure who is only perceptible as she disappears through contrasts of white light. This white light is made possible by the type of camera used: la caméra paluche (the handycam). This camera offered a mobility that created a new modality for investing spaces and moving between different milieux at various speeds, as seen in Roland Baladi’s Écrire Paris avec les rues de cette ville, 1973, where the camera is installed on a motorbike which follows “a predetermined route according to the graphic design of the word Paris.”46 To shoot the video, the driver had to complete all five letters in under an hour in order to fit within the sixty-minute-long magnetic tape. Gradually, the letter 43 See Gotthardt 2016. 44 Also in 1981, the Black Film Center/Archive was established at Indiana University, Bloomington, offering the first archival repository dedicated to films about and by African American people. 45 Kuntzel 2006, p. 344. 46 Belloir 1981, p. 24.

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appears at the bottom of the screen. The high speed of images shot from the motorbike contrasts with the very low speed of the writing of the letters on the screen. Also in 1980, multi-media pioneers Nil Yalter and Nicole Croiset created Les Rituels together: a video installation presented at the ARC, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris for an exhibition called Espaces Libres. In Les Rituels, Yalter and Croiset “communicate remotely via a closed video circuit connecting two scenic locations, each with a camera, a television set on the same floor and a VCR. Communication is essentially visual and is based on symbols of identity and difference between the sexes (masks and mirrors) conveyed by direct images from cameras and videotape recorders.”47 The images of their two bodies were transmitted via a television monitor, infiltrating their respective spaces or doubling their images via mirrors and camera angles. During the performance, Yalter and Croiset executed various rituals such as lighting a candle and separating marbles in two separate bowls between boys and girls. Video images captured Yalter and Croiset’s bodies and movements. At times, the circular continuity of the visual exchange between the monitors, as well as the movement of the spectators in the space, created a form of wholeness. Depth of field as well as layers of movement added to the sensation of an exploded and yet networked presentation. While significantly different in both form and content, Les Rituels and La Desserte Blanche created the appearance of simplicity (daily gestures and movements) while building an interconnected complexity between several relationships: appearance and disappearance; spatial inscription and visual segregation. In both instances, the video functions as an object of critical inquiry that moves away from a framework concerned with signs, expressions, and figures (as in painting, film, and photography) to question video-image operations on bodily presence and the technical modulations of space and time facilitated by the video medium. Video does not impose a visual regime like photography or film; it offers the modulation and movement in-between aesthetic regimes, revealing the operation of the mise-en-mouvement. In the case of the Kuntzel’s as well as Yalter and Croiset’s productions, the use of video demonstrates a “new attitude” towards moving-image making. 48 This attitude embraces the malleability of the medium; specifically its capacity to be used either as a recording instrument, as we see in the case of La Desserte Blanche, or as a medium that “restitutes 47 Ibid., p. 22. 48 Berger 1974, p. 10.

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the image simultaneously of its capture,” as we see in Rituels. 49 Not only can video relay and broadcast images in real time, but with the advent of synthesizer technology, video also has the capacity to generate a variety of visual and audio materials without camera or microphone input. It is because of this performative dimension that political minorities have been leaders in video art; though they are mostly unrecognized innovators.50 These examples speak to a specif ic dimension of video technology: its openness to other sets of indeterminacies, including decentring the gaze and embodying another point of view: one that can walk into different places and capture images from “the knee, the stomach, the elbow, the ear.”51 Because video recorders could be carried and operated by one person, almost anywhere, thanks to video recorders’ sensitivity to infra-red light, they offered an autonomy that helped a wide array of people to engage with the medium. Now, with cameras attached to smartphones, video continues to operate in our hands and play with our fingers. All these developments deeply inform the making of video objects as tools to reclaim modes of expression and operations of communication where both the cultural and political foundation of techno-epistemologies can be interrogated anew. In other words, video images fulfil the need to independently document the political and economic struggles of the postmodern realities that mark the period from the early 1970s up to the present day.

Artists/activists as Image Technicians To be a theorist of installations, and contemporary video installation in particular, is to work with rather ambiguous material.52 No one really agrees on the contours and definitions of the installation as a contemporary form.53 When one engages in installation, one deals with live-art, performance, happenings, and representation; and yet the notion of installation—the placing of objects and/or people to perform a certain function—is also meant to challenge these categories. Pioneer art critic Claire Bishop affirms that “it is possible to categorize works of installation by the type of experience they structure for the viewer”54 and defines four types of 49 50 51 52 53 54

Van Assche 1990, p. 74. See Herriman 2016. Duguet 1982, p. 84. See Blocker 2016. See Albu 2016; Deutsche 1996; McTighe 2012; Rebentisch 2003; Suderburg 2000; Reiss 1999. Bishop 2005, p. 10.

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embodied subjects invited to physically enter the often “theatrical,” “immersive” or “experimental”55 space of the installation: a psychoanalytical subject, a phenomenological subject, a disintegrated subject, and a political subject.56 This approach resides in the importance of the viewing subject as the operative factor in installation and considers installation as directed at a subjectivity and demanding its presence to complete the art form.57 In order to account for these kinds of practices, art historians often engage with archival materials gathered by a handful of witnesses (spectators, journalists, curators) to attest to the specific occurrence of the installation in its inherently ephemeral attributes. Photographic accounts, moving-image footage, and reviews are the usual material used to do art historiography. Because the installation is meant to produce an aesthetic experience that can only occur within distinct spatial and temporal constraints, it was often left to the art historian to weave together the pieces of a puzzle that were otherwise left unknown. Among the many terms often applied to talk about installation art—such as site-determined performance, site-oriented happenings, site-related representation—one can sense that the placing of objects and/or people in a situation is often the primary concern of this art form.58 The rather ambiguous notion of installation is increasingly preceded by an attribute, as Miwon Kwon points out, that insists on the place rather than the viewer—as in “site-determined,” “project-oriented,” “site-related” installation.59 The tendency to emphasize the site and the context of the project reflects an important shift in the making and understanding of installation art: the move away from the viewing subject as the main agent of the art piece in favour of the relationship between the site and the installation. In this book, much attention is paid to video images and installation in particular because of their performative dimension. Video art, as image and installation, challenges the notion of a privileged space of seeing; it is not simply an object at the centre of the representation but a process that interrogates the condition of possibility of the visible and the audible. As such, video is conceived as both a “theoretical machine” and a “metacritical apparatus,” which can produce its own thought process, to better engage the world of image and representation.60 Because of the performative aspect of 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., pp. 6–11. 57 Reiss cited in Bishop 2005, p. 6. 58 Berger 1974, p. 8. 59 Kwon 2002, p. 1. 60 Dubois 2011, pp. 42–43.

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video technology, video installation grants moving images a critical force to address newly engendered technologies of relation. I use video-installation art and activism—a critical stage in moving-image epistemologies—to further address the moving-image environment that is proliferating in the early twenty-first century. In video installations, images have their own temporality (speed, slowness but also relations to past and future events) and their own spatiality (size, scale, zoom but also relational geographies that fluctuate between proximity, intimacy, and foreign entities). As art historian Anne-Marie Duguet suggests, the medium of staging is central to video-installation art: The [video] image becomes a stage that can be travelled across and browsed, without resistance. The stage is everywhere. […] Architectural image, stage to be explored, volume of representation, it is always a question of conferring time upon space, nuances to artificiality, resemblance to the informal, to increase the multidimensionality of a representation.61

Duguet highlights one central aspect of video art: video’s capacity to be staged and thus to act as a mirror of society. In video installation, the exhibition of a particular system of presentation highlights the operational and relational rather than the representational dimension of video technology. Video is a medium of relation rather than representation to the extent that it puts in effect networks of ideas, ideologies, and exchanges at stake in and outside of the image. In the words of art historian Mathilde Roman: “The apparatus for exhibiting the animated image, be it a monitor, a screen or a simple ray of light, is conceived as creating aesthetic conditions to be explored.”62 The explorative mode of video installation makes time visible in space as much as it makes space sensitive to time. It is a relational technology where operations of time and operations in space can be staged and thus performed. Philippe Dubois suggested that video is not an object but un état expérimental (an experimental state).63 To think about video, he suggests, one might want to stop seeing video as an image that belongs to other image categories.64 Instead, Dubois’ proposition centres video as a process of experimentation and a mode of thought. I build on both Duguet 61 62 63 64

Duguet 2011, p. 9. Roman 2016, p. 5⁠. Dubois 2011, p. 8. Ibid., p. 99.

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and Dubois’ work to emphasize the technicity of video processes and to interrogate the technical realm that informs such an experimental state/ stage. I understand video as a technical object that is important precisely because its technical structure is malleable and open to experimentation. I take the media specificity of video technology as well as its historical reality, such as the making available of the Portapak in the late ’60s and early ’70s, as that which drives the aesthetic affordances of artworks such as Belloir’s, Hatoum’s, Kuntzel’s, Sedira’s, and Yalter’s. By looking at video and video-art installation as both a stage and an experimental process, I question how artists open up, in the field of technicality, a new modality of engaging with operations such as recollection (chapter 1), modulation (chapter 2), capture (chapter 3), and desire (chapter 4). I do so to further question the media affordances of video technologies and to understand how video art and activism attempt to confront and modulate the effects of image technologies on contemporary life. In media studies much emphasis has been placed on the reflexive aspect of the video medium: or video’s ability to reflect upon both itself and other media forms. Because video can echo preceding media forms such as music, sculpture, painting, text, film, and theatre, its aesthetics are concerned with a reflexive function. In the words of media theorist Yvonne Spielmann, video is a “reflexive medium,” meaning that its operational constituency allows the medium to reflect upon itself and to interrogate its own process of expression.65 The reflexive function of video art is embedded in its hybridity and intermediality: two characteristics that create openness in video technology to aesthetic change. In Video: The Reflexive Medium, Spielmann engages with a wide corpus of international artists such as Nam Junk Paik, Dara Birnbaum, Klaus vom Bruch, Peter Campus, Les Levines, Jean-François Guidon, Richard Sierra, Robert Cahen, Valie Export, and Joan Jonas, to name a few. Spielmann presents video as a field of investigation for media theory. Building on Spielmann’s account, video has the capacity to produce forms that reflect upon their own medial components. This aspect of video is central to the critique of other media as seen in Maso et Miso vont en bateau by Nadja Ringart, Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig, and Ioana Wieder from the all-women collective Les Insoumuses. In this work from 1976, often called a documentary, the women responded to a TV show they watched on December 30, 1975, in which Bernard Pivot interviewed Françoise Giroud, the Secrétaire d’Etat à la Condition Féminine. Because of the sexism of the Giroud’s response, the collective wanted to reply. They built a satirical 65 See Spielmann 2008.

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commentary to highlight the masochistic and misogynistic tendencies (Maso and Miso from the title) of Giroud’s vision. Their video is a reflexive medium to replay and comment on video-mediated content that is widely distributed by broadcasting technology, such as national TV. My research develops in close relation with Spielmann’s work in an attempt to continue the discussion concerning video’s potential to be a medium of reflection, while emphasizing what other specific artworks may add to this interrogation concerning the performative dimension of our audio-visual culture. The performativity central to video art situates the artist as an ‘image technician,’ to borrow a term coined by Spielmann.66 I understand the image technician as an artist of the image who uses materiality, space, time, and technics to shape the ground from which a critical approach to media objects can emerge. Such an image technician is busy working on the processual dimension of their object, bringing the latter to an increasing level of complexity and openness. In this context, the question is not so much the artistic value of an object but the emergence of a technique to interrogate the conditions of experience. Here, the artist is a technician to the extent that he or she deploys, through the work of the imagination, a new modality of engaging with both technique and culture. In the context of video objects, this technician is one who focuses on the relation between form and information to reveal the operational ground within a societal structure. This performative approach to video objects can be found in the work of video artist Catherine Ikam who created Identité, a video installation divided across three rooms and exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in 1980. In the first room, the spectator is missing on the screen despite the camera pointing at him. In the second room, the screen shows the spectator his own delayed image searching for its representation on screen. In the third room, the image of the spectator is scrutinized via nine monitors, each showing pieces of his face through different angles and at different scales. Reflecting on the disintegration of the face, its exploitation and distribution in cyberspace, this installation combined video art and cryptography to reveal the presence of a fragmented and magnified self through “separate input-output units.”67 Animated in real time by computer programmes, the face of the spectator enters what Nam Jun Paik called a “disintegration chamber” to produce a performative interrogation on the presence, disappearance, and making of the figure through electronic means.68 66 Ibid., p. 73. 67 Paik 1995, p. 202. 68 Ibid.

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Video installation art makes use of diverse technological settings that offer a stage from which the image can be experienced and explored by the user/spectator. One can walk on video projections, circle around a monitor in a museum installation, look at the screen, through the screen, and beneath the screen to explore other modalities of vision. Video is a performative medium that has the capacity to interrogate but also modulate the space and time in which it is displayed. I analyse how video is embedded in specific operations—from the pixelization of the image to its algorithmically produced materiality—and in specific settings to suggest that video objects are performative, because they can produce internal and external change within their environment. In video installation other modes of relating to the moving image are developed through the presentation of multi-screen environments. Whereas the cinema is an experience based on the concealment of the apparatus, where the body of the viewer is paused in a dream-like fashion, here, in video installations, the spectator participates in the work both spatially and temporally. Rather than being positioned, the viewing subject of video-installation art is constantly negotiating time and space according to relational media objects. Created in 1992 by Joan Jonas and set in Berlin, Revolted by the Thought of Known Places presents colourful video panels, monitors, and freestanding screens dividing the room. The screens create a relational architecture in the space, revealing an installation that invites the viewer into its constitutional components. The video object in Jonas’ installation is performative to the extent that it plays a role in modulating the perception of the spectator who is both in and part of the space of vision. Spectators are invited to turn around, to flâne, to skip, to stand. They are encouraged to be in their body according to the way in which their body responds to the space. As art historian Claire Bishop points out: “Installation art […] addresses the viewer directly as a literal presence in the space. Rather than imagining the viewer as a pair of disembodied eyes that survey the work from a distance, installation art presupposes an embodied viewer whose senses of touch, smell and sound are as important as their sense of vision.”69 This insistence on the embodied viewer is a fundamental characteristic of video installation. The visitor in the gallery—where most video installations are presented—is introduced to a spatio-temporal journey delivered by a dispositif éléctronique (electronic apparatus), where both the design and the mediality of the image are placed at the centre of the experience.70 69 Bishop 2005, p. 6. 70 Duguet 2001, p. 18.

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Video installation no longer requires the audience to stand still in a predefined and fixed position; it allows the viewer to be in movement, therefore permitting a different experience of moving images than the ones offered or allowed by cinema. Video installation art is now open to more fluctuating and ambulatory perspectives. The ambulatory perspective of the audience refers to Anne Friedberg’s book Window Shopping where a flâneur-type of viewership is theorized in relation to media proliferation. Friedberg argues that nineteenth-century visual experience anticipated the contemporary virtual mobility through time and space that is characteristic of postmodern cultural identity. In this book, I take a slightly different approach. Most of the artists discussed here are not interested in the screen as functioning as a window onto which viewers project themselves. Rather, they take the screen as a trace-surfacing device where the fleeting of light and the passing of time are the basis of a transductive, rather than representative, moving-image content. The enmeshment of different temporal dynamics constituted by moving bodies and images requires that we consider the viewer’s experience from a different spatio-temporal framework. In this study, the video object is understood as producing video-time where temporalities are sensed in volume and where a specific modulation is produced in space. Video-time and what I call the volume image of video technologies become categories to question video objects as performing agents. This framework is made of the generative encounter between the video objects and the ambulatory displacement of a moving audience in the video installation. The volume of the video object modulates the space where the spectator experiences these different temporalities. In other words, video has as much to do with the modulation of time as it has with the activation of modes of spatial inhabitancy. In her particularly insightful account of the screen in video installation art, art historian Kate Mondloch emphasizes what is certainly the most important element of this art form: namely, its capacity to spatialize time.71 By “spatializing time” she refers to the video installation as placing time and its fluctuations at the centre of the art form. The space of the installation operates as a stage on which time is put on display via the video. Drawing on Daniel Birnbaum’s account of how media inserts “spatial modes into the temporal dimension,” Mondloch underlines the different temporal dynamics at stake in video installation art, where video installations present moving images to moving bodies in space.72 Indeed, the coming together of both 71 Mondloch 2010, p. 41. 72 Ibid., p. 40.

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moving images and moving bodies often presents “contradictory durational impulses.”73 Namely, the video presents time’s fluctuations while also being presented to a moving audience that brings its own plural temporality. This durational plurality of both the video and the audience often creates the contradictory temporal dynamics that Mondloch places at the centre of the video installation experience.

The Discrete Imaginary Recently, a theoretical turn has been taking place in media studies concerning the potential of video to create forms of temporal expression on its own. As a consequence of such technical autonomy, Ina Blom argues that “analogue video forged associations or alliances with other objects, perceptual systems, and subjectivities so as to expand or propagate the time-critical operations that are among its key features.”74 Time-critical situations are modes of engaging critically in the terms and practices grounded in the interrelations between culture and technology. Coined by media theorist Wolfgang Ernst, the time-critical aspect of a media object aims to develop an archaeological approach to the mediated image that consists of unravelling the interconnected layers of symptoms, signals, and information contained in culture.75 For Ernst, culture is a function of knowledge (understood as both transfer and storage); and media within culture indicate different levels of temporality constitutive of a generative archive. By generative, Ernst means that the medium itself understands signals, which he defines as a “technoarchive” operating both at a technical (apparatus) and a symbolic (record) level.76 In his account, media themselves become “archaeologists of knowledge,” meaning that they are a depository of a generative archive that grants access to new configurations of technology and epistemology. Ernst offers a modality of inquiry that takes into consideration that which would have been left out of the discursive message by focusing on the function of the technology itself. Temporal expressions have been at the forefront of both theoretical and historiographical discussions on the medium specificity of moving image objects in shaping modes of perception, recollection, and projection. Film 73 Ibid. 74 Blom 2016, p. 16. 75 Ernst 2013, p. 27.⁠ 76 Ibid., p. 28.⁠

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scholars have long paid attention to the potential of cinema to, firstly, actualize an understanding of the psychic as an apparatus of image production and, secondly, highlight the cultural relevance of the moving image as a creative process of thought-making in its own right. This first approach was particularly important in France in the 1970s where film scholars such as Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry created the apparatus theory. In this theory, representational cinema was understood as based on the concealment of the cinematic apparatus. Because the apparatus was hidden behind the spectator, it made one forget, according to Baudry, the material conditions that produce the filmic projection in the spectator’s mind.77 Through this concealment of the moving-image apparatus, the power of the cinema-effect unfolds to reveal a “more archaic mode of identification.”78⁠ This apparatus was thus understood through an analogy to primordial scenes, as exemplified by Plato’s allegory of the cave, to reveal the work of projected images and their layering functions in the psyche. Metz built on a Marxist reading of history to reveal “the other mirror that is the filmic screen.”79 Metz developed an understanding of cinema as a technique de l’imaginaire (technique of the imaginary) and took technique as that which is grounded in the historical time of capitalism and the societal reality of industrial civilization. Anchored in Freudo-Lacanian understandings of the psyche, Baudry and Metz engaged in cinema as an object permitting access to the effects of an ideological system or operation of thought where the relation of the spectator to the film is understood as an object-relation that is, according to Melanie Klein, a phantasmagorical relation based on an imaginary object. This meta-psychological approach to film was central in developing the first wave of feminist critiques of dominant cinema. Film scholar Constance Penley centred her critique on the problem of identification and highlighted the value of unpacking the work of the imaginary and its manipulation in the spectator’s experience of watching films.80 Penley saw in the English co-op filmmaking movement, and especially the work of Malcom LeGrice and Peter Gidal, a “political efficacy in offering a cinematic experience outside of and against the strategies and effects of dominant classical cinema.”81 More recently, research on temporality and spatiality has forced cinema and critical studies scholars to acknowledge what leading 77 Baudry 1974, p. 42. 78 Baudry 1976, pp. 119–20. 79 Metz 1986, p. 3.⁠ 80 Penley 1977, p. 3. 81 Ibid.

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thoerist Kara Keeling calls “the black gaze,” namely the regime of white truth at play in cinematic processes, understood as processes involved in the production and reproduction of social inequalities.82 The writings of philosopher Gilles Deleuze mark a second important moment in film studies where cinema was understood as a thought-making process in and of itself. In his two tomes on cinema, respectively dedicated to movement and time, and published in 1983 and 1985, Deleuze opened up a philosophical mode of engaging with cinematic images. Deleuze drew a parallel between the creative activity of cinema and that of philosophy by defining philosophy as a discipline that creates concepts and cinema as one that creates blocs of movement/duration (durée). Deleuze’s concept of the time-image offered an important contribution to the theoretical understanding of time at play in modern cinema, revealing the dual flow of time which “simultaneously makes the present pass and preserves the past in itself” and grounds one time-image “in the past, the other in the present.”83 The time-image and the movement-image were central concepts to understanding cinema as a creative process similar to the process of philosophy.84 The intersection between thinking and moving-image making has been at the core of recent publications from scholars invested in the power of moving images in shaping theoretical inputs. Mieke Bal’s Thinking in Film carefully engages with the work of Finish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila to reveal the political potential of video art. Deleuze first coined the term “society of control” in a conference hosted by the Fondation Européenne pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Son (FEMIS), a film school situated in Montmartre and founded in 1943. By means of the term “society of control,” Deleuze developed a critique of communication that sees “information as exactly the system of control.”85 The concept of the “society of control” highlights the shift from a disciplinary society based on milieux d’enfermement (milieux of detention) such as the school, the prison, and the hospital, as analysed by Michel Foucault, to a society where individuals are in relation with one another through circuits of controlled movements. For Deleuze, information is communicated through a system of belief that dictates what one must believe, think, and how to behave as if one believes in such a system.86 Deleuze uses the information highway, a cybernetic example par excellence, 82 See Keeling 2007. 83 Deleuze 1989, p. 98.⁠ 84 See Bal 2013. 85 Deleuze 1990, p. 72. 86 Ibid.

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to describe a society that facilitates exchange by imposing order through the regulation of its informational tracks. Here, the work of art, and cinema in particular, “has nothing to do with communication” unless it stands as an act of resistance.87 While the connection between cinema and philosophy has been crucial in installing film studies as a discipline worthy of academic research, the stakes of video images reside elsewhere in the constant movement between exploration and communication. As modes of critical inquiry, the video recorder and its computer-generated images become tools to further expand the relation between culture and technique. Video art brings together painting, literature, photography, music, and cinema in the synthesis of its references. In this sense, video is a “creative synthesis,” to borrow the words of Gilbert Simondon; it engages in the synthesis of former modes of expression, and creates a new method of engaging with the real.88 It challenges the central question of representation and figuration, becoming the precise place from which to revaluate the relation between culture and technique in contemporary society. Video sits between technology and performance, at the threshold of both adaptation and invention, changing at the speed of light and with a power to implement and shape socio-cultural practices of knowledge and technology. The rapid proliferation of video technologies in contemporary life, starting in the mid-twentieth century, is symptomatic of what Simondon names a déphasage (dephasing). This dephasing happens when a civilization is no longer in synch between the technical evolution and the socio-cultural adoption of new techniques.89 Like any other technical object, video is in tension between technicity and socio-cultural symbols and reflects a technical transition that informs both cultural practices and historical realities. Video technology is made of technical transitions that capture social-historical tendencies, revealing how image technologies activate zones of socio-technical realities. In the content of this book on a philosophy of technology, societies are understood as a tendency that oscillates between cultural content and technical content where video is treated as a symptom of sociogenesis, evolving through a fifty-year period, that is nearly reaching saturation. This theoretical inquiry into videography would not have been possible without the efforts of leading figures such as Raymond Bellour, Anne-Marie Duguet, and Bernard Stiegler, who explored the specificity of moving-image 87 Ibid., p. 74. 88 Simondon 1989, p. 34. 89 Nony 2017, p. 129.

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technology as a system defined according to codes, structures, and unconscious forces.90 This system, understood from a linguistic, semiotic, and later psychoanalytic point of view is leading the reconceptualization of processes of video technology as an object of study. As exemplified by the work of Christian Metz,91 when the image was conferred its own materiality it gained a significant theoretical power to address the nature of representational practices—one that Mulvey and hooks defined as ideological, patriarchal, and racist.92 I build on theorists’ critique of the cinematic apparatus to engage the ways in which video technology renews the conditions and operations of the image.93 Video objects are not simply understood for their societal function or their artistic operation; they stand as objects whose technical structure offers endless possibilities for modification and relation. As such, video art is an object for the critical study of the informational trajectory of a society. This trajectory is an organizational principle that operates through the video object to shape different realms of psychic and collective reality. While non-technical images, such as paintings, operate according to representational schemes and symbols, technically produced images, as seen in the discrete image of the video object, operate according to programmes that model and thus modulate relational modes of belonging to the world. While one type of image engages the realm of interpretation and knowledge formation, the other integrates information for the sake of predicable projections. In other words, with the dissemination of the discrete-state machine in the infra layers of sociality, the cultural critique of image production and distribution is now compelled to address the unspoken agenda of such a strategic generalization of media usage in daily life. It is thus urgent to address what definition one can give to the notion of the image when technical structures are drastically changing traces, supplements, as well as modalities of projection. Traditional images are about the survival of a trace: the imprint of an emotion that can withstand the ravages of time. Technical images, and especially the discrete image, are about the imposition of a prégnance (property of being a percetive structure), as opposed to a presence, that already assumes the quality of programmable structure and thus predictable signification. In the realm of video, the process of discretization produces a grammaticalization of the sensible: namely, the transformation of experience 90 91 92 93

See Metz 1986; Bellour 2012. Buckland 2017, p. 27. See Mulvey 1988; hooks 1992. Bellour 2012, p. 172.

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into discrete data. In a short text published in the English version of his dialogue with Jacques Derrida, Ecographies of television, Bernard Stiegler points to an event specific to the end of the twentieth century that changed our relationship to movement: A great event […] is the appearance of the analogico-digital image. This image will have extreme consequences for our intelligence of movement. In fact, the analogico-digital image is the beginning of a systematic discretization of movement – that is to say, of a vast process of the grammaticalization of the visible. The analogico-digital image calls into question what André Bazin calls the objectivity of the lens [l’objectivité de l’objectif] in analogue photography, what Barthes also calls the this was [le ça a été] the noeme of the photo. The noeme of the photo is what in phenomenology would be called its intentionality.94

Stiegler’s notion of the “analogico-digital image,” which he also names the discrete image, is crucial in identifying the changes provoked by the emergence of the digital as the acceleration of the discretization of movement. In mathematics and machine learning, discretization designates the process through which a continuous function or model is transferred into discrete attributes. The discretization of movement—the process through which movement is decomposed into discrete features—goes together with the grammaticalization of the visible; a vast and systemic process in which the visible is decomposed into variables that can be analysed. The discrete image produced by video objects is the latest phase of systemic discretization. Such a conceptualization of the image engages the digital, understood as a stage (as opposed to an autonomous moment), in the ongoing technogenesis of the human.95 The discrete image, according to Stiegler, is a technical synthesis. Such a synthesis is artefactual, that is to say it is essentially open to the possibility, even if accidental, of falsification.96 At stake is the possibility of a discrete image that keeps intact the belief value of its formal structure (photographic images imply the ça a été) while falsifying the relation to the real conditions of production of this same image. The rapid invasion of synthetic images, namely, images produced by discrete-state machines, forces us to revaluate Barthes’ photographic paradigm of the ça a été. What is important here is the 94 Stiegler 2007, pp. 148–49. 95 Hansen 2006, p. 21. 96 Stiegler 1996, p. 169.

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regime of truth that is reconfigured with the dissemination of programmable falsified images.97 The discrete image is one that produces a new kind of fantasmagoria. It is no longer the presence of a trace that conveys that which has been into the present; it is the fantasy of a presence that is no longer attached to a past time. The manipulation of image-objects, namely images that function as supports for the production of mental images, is central to the questioning of a traditionally anchored regime of truth. The fantasy produced by the discrete image is the fantasy of an imaginary realm that no longer needs to render present a past in the form of traces. The computational quality of the discrete image creates its pregnance by simply admitting a separation between the embodied realm of the perceptual and the phantasmagoric dimension of the unreal. Discretization also takes place due to the fact that the synthetic image can be produced in the segregation of movement between that which is and that which has been, creating un écart (a leap) that is no longer the one of the embodied subjects found in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. For Merleau-Ponty, the absolute priority of the phenomenal body is what grants access to the possibility of a relation between an organism and its milieu. In the case of the relation between the subject and the discrete image, the milieu itself gets triggered by the possibility of a false referent or the presence of an absent one. The synthetic image of video technology can create, invent, and perform reality. This characteristic distinguishes video from other technically produced images such as photography and cinema, whose conception of time is grounded in the technical presence of a past. Video, thus, produces technical operations that call for a new approach to time and space in relation to moving-image technology. I argue that the performance of video objects is central to the architectural modelling of psychic and collective individuals in society. By moving towards a conception of video technology as performative object, I have tried to situate video praxis as a medium through which to engage other modes of relating to reality. Specifically, I have questioned the performative dimension of video utterances where the function of the video object and the mobility of the spectator in space play a role in redefining our relation to the image object in our contemporary culture. Video objects define both the technical object of video, an electronic object that historically resides between analogue and digital technologies, and the image object that performs in the imaginary structure of our mind. The image object defines both the technical, psychic, and collective realms that shape mental images. We must struggle to comprehend then 97 Rouvroy and Stiegler 2016, p. 12.

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that video technology, both analogue and digital, is now functioning as discrete structures. The image object is always inscribed in both historical and technical contexts that can no longer be separated as they mutually influence each other. Discretization is not a distribution in the sense that Jacques Rancière refers to le partage (the distribution) of the sensible. The distribution of the sensible is both the sharing of a common experience and a modality of distributing exclusive parts.98 It is this specific distribution of the sensible that gives shape to political experience: that shows who belongs or not to a certain space and time in common. Rancière’s question of politics in relation to aesthetics is distinct from the denunciation of a certain aestheticization of the political realm. He urges us to think about the distribution of the sensible as a tool to question who takes part in the making of the common. The digital grammaticalization that I elaborate in this research has to do with the sequentialization of the sensible, its translation into mathematical formulas, and its reproduction as a feature of our contemporary experience. I do not pose the existence of an a priori common, nor do I engage in the question of partage or distribution. For me, Rancière’s notion of le prendre part (the taking part) needs to be revaluated from the point of view of operations that pre-emptively dissect, in the texture of experience, the mere possibility of a common (see chapter 3). Capture and sequentialization, rather than distribution, allow us to pose the urgent question of the algorithmic control and impoverishment of the sensible. By grammaticalization of the sensible, I refer to the process that selects, in the synchronic flow of the sensible, discrete moments that can be extracted and thus reproduced. This process, in the age of the analogico-digital image—the discrete image as Stiegler puts it—is effectuated at the speed of light through electronic mediations. This process is exemplified by the use of video-image profiling. More often than not, video camera surveillance now deploys software so that the recording of the image can simultaneously be analysed and its data extracted according to predetermined patterns, such as the face of a person, or the colour of an object. The audio-visual perception at the core of the act of video recording is now doubled by an apparatus that grammatizes space and time for the sake of extracting data. Finally, minding the image of the world, that is, making sense of the worldly experience as a moving-image experience, challenges notions of the real, the imaginary, and the imagination at play in-between. The “discrete” in relation to the “imaginary” functions like a double-edged sword: it is that which goes 98 Rancière 2000, p. 12.

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unnoticed and yet that which separates into distinguishable entities. The discrete imaginary defines the emergences of discrete structures that shape the becoming individual of both psychic and collective entities. Discretization stands as an attempt not to draw too much attention to the activity at stake. The discretization of our imaginary announces both the passing unnoticed of structures that shape psychic and collective capacities to produce and share knowledge, and the segregation of such an imaginary from other operations of sense making, such as sublimation and projection. Using the notion of the discrete imaginary, I have aimed to interrogate the infiltration of the imaginary modes of connectivity and signification in a world where video images are the driving force determining communication. The discretization of our psychic and collective imaginaries is the central operation of videography, where discrete-state machines not only operate in an increasingly synchronized manner for the sake of constant communication but also create platforms of asignification.99 The imaginary, or what I am now calling the discrete imaginary, refers to the changes deployed in the internal structures of our mind, in the relational modes of belonging to our bodies in space, as well as the codified structures now governing our capacities to produce and exchange knowledge. If cinema was, according to Metz, a “technique of the imaginary”100 within the historical context of both capitalist and industrial societies, this book argues that video has morphed into a performative technology that operates on the psychic apparatus of individuals and the historical realities of societies.

Chapter Outline With this performative approach to video technology in mind, the book’s chapters investigate a range of theoretical problems, such as the structure of human memory, the spatial modulation of information, the pre-emptive power of surveillance technology, and the impact of the technological milieu in the emergence of desire. In the first chapter, which thinks in great detail about technological models of storage, processing, and information transmission, I discuss the work of Thierry Kuntzel. I argue that Kuntzel’s video work provides alternatives to an entrenched theory of memory in relation to technology. I show how Kuntzel’s notion of the videogram along with Bernard Stiegler’s notion of the idiotext can be productively adapted to the task of addressing performative imagery in relation to memory in 99 Rouvroy and Stiegler 2016, p. 12. 100 Metz 1986, pp. 9–10.

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the digital present. I discuss Kuntzel’s video works as offering multidimensional modalities of writing with light and time. I examine the concept of the “volume image” to tackle the shift from a prosthetic to an aphaeretic understanding of memory in relation to video technology. The second chapter, which involves space and modulation, considers the subversive images manifest in the work of Fiona Tan, Nil Yalter, and Zineb Sedira. In their respective works, these artists present video images as performing narratives that question the imperial gaze. In this chapter, I build on Gayatri Spivak’s concept of the native informant and Chela Sandoval’s notion of topography to argue that the performative image of video technology can be unruly in relation to the dominant structure of representation. Placing Tan, Yalter, and Sedira in conversation, I also ponder how performative technology as methodology, remembers or forgets history and undoes or scrolls through colonization and the coloniality of visual culture often transmitted by media technology. In chapter 3, I revaluate the models of interpellation (Fanon, Althusser) from the point of view of Big Data ideology (Rouvroy) to consider the implementation of programmed life and “premature death” (Gilmore) in digital societies. The chapter engages debates in surveillance studies and questions the making of racialized bodies by telling the story of Thierry Kuntzel’s work of art Hiver, la mort de Robert Walser presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1991, which focuses on the themes of terror and death but also eroticism and sexuality. In this chapter, I engage the pre-emptive models of data extraction to question the racialized technology of societies of incarceration and control. I argue that race in relation to technology is a problem of discerning the cause from the conditions of implementation of racist policies in societies. Kuntzel’s piece usefully addresses the subjects of history that technology writes on and the wider consequences of technologically driven narratives of survival and resistance. The last chapter foregrounds the presence of video technology in shaping the milieu where desire emerges. Desire is understood neither as an object to be possessed, nor as image to identify with. I interrogate the milieu we share with video technology to foreground an ecology of desiring, desired, and desirable relations to performative images. Moving beyond the psychological model applied to video and its aesthetics of narcissism, this chapter looks at both dispersive and penetrating video images. I do so by looking at the demolition of the last female jail in Paris portrayed in Nicole Croiset, Judy Blum, and Nil Yalter’s collective work La Roquette, prison de femmes from 1974 and by comparatively approaching two video installations: Mona Hatoum’s Corps étranger from 1994 and Thierry Kuntzel’s La Peau from

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2007. Dispersive and penetrating modes of video existence foreground the necessity to think about desire in relation to the milieu where images, objects, and subjects cohabit. As a mirror reflection of the performative dimension of the video image, with which the book begins, the conclusion considers the increased discretization of imagination and engages the concomitant narratives about history, knowledge, and technology. I pay attention to video as a technology of the imaginary and formulate the concept of the “discrete imaginary” as an attempt to tackle the often pervasive if not addictive effects of dominant video technology on the informational structure of society.

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Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1999. Dean, Jodi. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Debord, Guy. La Société du Spectacle. Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1967. Debray, Régis. Introduction à la médiologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000. Deleuze, Gilles. “Avoir Une Idée en Cinéma.” In Jean-Marie Straub Danièle Huillet, edited by Dominique Païni and Charles Tesson, 63–78. Lédignan: Éditions Antigone, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2. Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Deutsche, Rosalyn. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. Didi Huberman, Georges. La survivance des lucioles. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2002. Dubois, Philippe. La Question Vidéo: Entre Cinéma et Art Contemporain. Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2011. Duguet, Anne-Marie. Déjouer l’Image: Créations Électroniques et Numériques. Paris: Jacqueline Chambon, 2001. Duguet, Anne-Marie. “La Paluche: Un Oeil au Bout des Doigts.” Télérama, Hors série no. 3 1982: 84. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “Reading Art as Confrontation.” e-flux 65 (May–August 2015): 1–6. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/65/336390/reading-art-as-confrontation/. Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Flusser, Vilém. “The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object: An Essay on the Ontological Standing of Photographs.” Leonardo 19, no. 4 (1986): 329–32. https://doi. org/10.2307/1578381. Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Galloway, Alexander R., Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark. Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Gotthardt, Alexxa. “The Brooklyn Museum Gives Fiercely Independent Artist Beverly Buchanan the Retrospective She Deserves.” Artsy, October 27, 2016. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-fiercely-independent-artist-beverlybuchanan-finally-gets-the-retrospective-she-deserves.

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Grosfoguel, Ramón. “The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self Knowledge 11, no. 1 (2013): 73–90. https://www.scinapse.io/papers/164054613. Groys, Boris. Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media. Translated by Carsten Strathausen. New York City: Columbia University Press, 2012. Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Hansen, Mark B. N. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. New York: Routledge, 2006. Hansen, Mark B. N. Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First Century Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Hayes, Patricia, and Iona Gilburt. “Other Lives of the Image.” Kronos 46, no. 1 (2020): 10–28. http://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/kronos/v46n1/02.pdf. Herriman, Kat. “A Brief History of Women in Video Art.” Artsy, January 13, 2016. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-why-are-there-so-many-greatwomen-video-artists. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Hui, Yuk, and Andreas Broeckmann. 30 Years After Les Immatériaux: Art, Science, and Theory. Germany: Meson Press, 2015. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991. Lovink, Geert. Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop and Michael Wutz. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999. Kuntzel, Thierry. “A Note Upon the Filmic Apparatus.” Quaterly Review of Film Studies1, no. 3 (1976): 266–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509207609360953. Kuntzel, Thierry. Title TK. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2006. Kuntzel, Thierry. “The Treatment of Ideology in the Textual Analysis of Film.” Screen 14, no. 3 (October 1973): 44–54. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/14.3.44. Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. London, Barbara. “Out on the Edge.” In Net Pioneers 1.0: Contextualizing Early Net-Based Art, edited by Dieter Daniels and Gunther Reisinger, 199–208. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009. Massumi, Brian. “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption.” Theory & Event 10, no. 2 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2007.0066. McTighe, Monica E. Framed Spaces: Photography and Memory in Contemporary Installation Art. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2012.

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Rouvroy, Antoinette, and Bernard Stiegler. “The Digital Regime of Truth: From the Algorithmic Governmentality to a New Rule of Law.” Translated by Anaïs Nony and Benoît Dillet. La Deleuziana 3 (2016): 6–29. http://www.ladeleuziana.org/ wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Rouvroy-Stiegler_eng.pdf. Said, Edward. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Arrow Books, 1981. Simondon, Gilbert. Du Mode d’Existence des Objects Techniques. Paris: Aubier, 2012. Simondon, Gilbert. L’individuation psychique et collective à la lumière des notions de Forme, Information, Potentiel et Métastabilité. Paris: Aubier, 1989. Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Simondon, Gilbert. Sur la Technique (1953–1983). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014. Spielmann, Yvonne. Video: The Reflexive Medium. Translated by Anja Well and Stan Jones. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. Stiegler, Bernard. Dans la disruption: Comment ne pas devenir fou? Paris: Éditions Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2016. Stiegler, Bernard, and Jacques Derrida. 1996. Écographies de la télévision. Entretiens filmés Paris: Galilée. Stiegler, Bernard, and Jacques Derrida. Ecographies of Television. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Suderburg, Erika, ed. Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Väliaho, Pasi. Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014. Van Assche, Christine. “Avant-Propos.” In La vidéo, un art, une histoire 1965–2007, 5–6. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2009. Van Assche, Christine. “De l’apport du vidéographique.” In Passages de l’image, edited by Christine Van Assche, Raymond Bellour, and Catherine David, 71–76. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1990. Vostell, Wolf. “TV and Videoart.” In 3e Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon: Installation, Cinéma, Vidéo, Informatique, 108–11. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1995. Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

1.

Volume-Image of Video Technology Abstract: In this chapter, which thinks in great detail about the technological models of storage, processing, and information transmission, I discuss the work of video pioneer Thierry Kuntzel. I argue that Kuntzel’s video work provides alternatives to the entrenched theory of memory in relation to technology. I show how Kuntzel’s notion of the videogram along with Bernard Stiegler’s notion of idiotext can be productively adapted to the task of addressing performative imagery in relation to memory in the digital present. I discuss Kuntzel’s video works as offering multidimensional modalities of writing with light and time. I examine the concept of the “volume-image” to tackle the shift from a prosthetic to an aphaeretic understanding of memory in relation to video technology. Keywords: memory, technology, time, video, Thierry Kuntzel

Yet since video is a temporal art, the most paradoxical effects of this technological appropriation of subjectivity are observable on the experience of time itself. – Frederic Jameson 1

In this context, video is not understood as an image technology based on optical principles but as a machine whose ability to contract and distribute temporal materials in an unfolding present resembles (in a rudimentary way) the working of human memory. – Ina Blom 2

1 2

Jameson 1991, p. 74. Blom 2016, pp. 15–16.

Nony, A., Performative Images: A Philosophy of Video Art Technology in France. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463722827_ch01

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Transductive Operations With the advent of video technology in the early 1970s, the relationship between technique and time began to raise critical questions concerning processes of memorization and historicization. This relationship changed according to a long genealogy of accumulated technological supports, such as writing, photography, radio, cinema, and television. These supports, often understood as prosthetic supports, have shaped our modes of knowledge retention and information transmission. Much like machine memory, human memory relies on input (experience), storage (the faculty to recall and remember experience), and processing (the conscious or unconscious act of processing experience).3 In this sense, both prosthetic and human memory offers a conception of time that is anchored in the layering and intermittence of these three concomitant functions. Central to input, storage, and processing is the retention of information by different means. We remember an event differently depending upon whether it is experienced live, mediated and shot on camera, written on a piece of paper, or shared orally with us. In other words, the means of memory retention are as important as the capacity to process experience; they structure the possibility of processing this information at a later stage. Wendy Chun insists that in today’s world of digital media, memory and storage are conflated “due to how everyday usage and parlance arrests memory and its degenerative possibilities in order to support dreams of superhuman digital programmability.”4 For Chun, the programmability of social behaviour resuscitates dreams of sovereign power and depends upon the incorporation of “historical programming hierarchies within the machine.”5 In “Introduction to Noology and Technique,” Benoît Dillet and I argued that: Such programmability is a response to and a product of the continuing change in relations between objects and subjects that are brought about by computing as a neoliberal form of governmentality. In this context, computers structure individuals’ behaviour to be determined by the fulfilment of certain desires that imperceptibly and yet materially support a larger system, thus becoming the most powerful form of neoliberal management.6 3 Chun 2008, p. 149. 4 Chun 2011, p. 34. 5 Ibid. 6 Dillet and Nony 2016, p. 30.

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The algorithmic extraction of information by discrete-state machines not only shifts the regime of production of tertiary retention (the retention of information by technical means), but it also changes the way individuals select both lived and mediated experience using their faculties of perception to recollect (images, data, materials) through the use of their imagination. This chapter situates video at the crossroads of both analogue and digital technologies to engage discrete-image technology in relation to memory. It aims to address the ways in which television programmes, communicative platforms, and increasingly, global networks of social media use video technology to produce new operative forms of image making in our brains. These technical images, which are a central component of what I call the “discretization of the imaginary”, condition our faculties of knowing, memorizing, and remembering. Video has gained increasing momentum in the acceleration and saturation of technical images that feed back into the realm of the subject. Newly engendered media technologies manage people’s behaviours precisely because such technology has acquired a form of agency by virtue of performing below the level of human perception.7 This technical capacity implies a drastic shift, or renversement, in the ways in which memory and technology are linked to one another in both analogue and video technology. The video signals of such technologies produce micro-temporal speeds that disrupt the continuous and linear understanding of time. As Ina Blom argues, the multiplicity of temporal technical operations afforded by video technologies is not only determined by the cultural ramifications of a certain historical period. Video technology is also based on technical capacities that have an agency of their own. Blom explores this agency through the working hypothesis that video “[has] subject-like properties and capacities for action.”8 The video object has a certain temporality and dynamic that is specific to its functioning as a media technology. Blom turns to video experimentations in the field of aesthetics precisely because the work of art offers the grounds on which to reflect upon “its powers of effectuation and construction”9 or what I call in the introduction the performative dimension of video art and video installation: its capacity to operate beyond the constraints or the vision of its creator/constructor and audience/user. While the paradigm of film technique consisted in capturing and projecting images, video signals can produce their own images with or without relying on reality. These 7 See Hansen 2015. 8 Blom 2016, p. 14. 9 Ibid.

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images are called synthetic images; they are created with informatic and electronic devices. Blom opens up a way of thinking about video technique that is centred on the micro-temporal affordances that the technology can develop on its own.10 This engagement with the nonlinear temporalities of media technologies is central to the work of scholars such as Steve Goodman and Luciana Parisi who argue in favour of a post-cybernetic conception of memory; one that focuses on the implantation, imposition, and pre-emption of media operations that no longer simply rely on lived bodily experiences.11 The working hypothesis of this chapter is that discrete-state machines and their computational modes of operation are dramatically changing the relation between memory and technology, asking us to revaluate the relationship between technique and time in twenty-first-century media societies. To address how video technologies are changing memory operations, the present chapter moves away from the time/movement nexus grounded in the filmic understanding of the image to think of video time-signatures as the emergence of a volume of time that questions memory in new and fundamental ways. Because video time-signatures are not necessarily calibrated to the human sense of time, video images produce temporalities that are not grounded in the a priori categories of space and time. These categories, as Mieke Bal puts it, finally “explode”12 leaving room for a more transductive understanding of technology as that which conditions time and space according to new sets of operative indeterminacy. In video, time and space are synthesized to create a (re)presentational system in volume where the viewer navigates the liminal space of various perceptive zones. This volume-image is a “synthesis in gestation,” to quote Anne-Marie Duguet’s formulation, where “concept and percept” can function as propaedeutic or introductory forces that shape matter in infinite directions.13 In the late twentieth century video-time, channels, flows, and distributive networks are at the core of the creation of an image as volume; a volume that modulates between past, present, and future through newly engendered modes of moving image existence. Unlike the time-image and movement-image of cinema, the volume-image of video offers a mode of engaging with multiple temporalities within the continuum of the video itself. This multiplicity 10 For a critical survey on the notion of affordance in relation to media technology, see Scarlett and Zeilinger 2019. 11 Goodman and Parisi 2010, p. 346. 12 Bal 2013, p. 105. 13 Duguet 2001, pp. 20–23.

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of temporalities challenges the past/present/future categories of time and revaluates our understanding of temporal operations such as protention and retention. Video images are constituted progressively through layers of everchanging signal processes. These processes create the volume-image of video technology as an open field; a transductive zone where multiple intensities can appear and disappear to create a new form of representational rhythm. As such, video-time is not the time-image of post-World War II cinema as such a filmic duration has been produced and understood in the West. As Yvonne Spielmann points out, even though video inherits the time-flow of television and its much-criticized hegemonic narrative, as tackled by experimental media artists such as Joan Jonas, Nam June Paik, and Bruce Nauman, video-time stands closer to a critique of informational technology and its broadcasting culture than the cinematographic and mental image developed in post-World War II cinema.14 I propose to look at video images as creating a volume of time in which the durational quality of memory, perception, and futurity can be questioned anew. I use Thierry Kuntzel’s notion of the “videogram” to rethink our relation to technical memory and prosthetic supports in the twenty-first century.15 The videogram defines the screen as a “zone of contact” and reveals the creation of multi-layered temporalities that disrupt our understanding of moving-image devices as synchronous and static prosthetic media. For Kuntzel, “The videogram becomes a volume: images placed one on top of the other—a memory volume.”16 It is often acknowledged that technical memory refers to the conditions under which the past is conserved in the present through technical means. However, I think it is important to keep questioning the notion of the prosthetic, and the supplement, precisely because it is a question of externalization of memory outside of the living subject and such externalization can now operate below the threshold of cognitive experience.17 In other words, questioning memory and technology, as well as the prosthetic dimension of increasingly computational supplements, addresses the challenges posed by media objects that restructure modes of psychic and collective existence according to new sets of indeterminacy.18 The indeterminacy in relation to technique and technology allows a machine to be sensitive to outside 14 See Spielman 2008. 15 Kuntzel 2006, p. 483. 16 Ibid. 17 See Hansen 2015. 18 Rouvroy and Berns 2013, p. 164.

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information. Here indeterminacy stands in opposition to automatism in the form of industrial organization. A sensitive machine is a machine understood as the materialization of a technical ensemble within which individual entities constantly organize and interpret the interrelation between human and machine.19 While prosthetic memory can be understood as dead storage waiting to be reactivated by human interaction, focusing on video images allows us to think of memory as depth in movement—as having a regenerative character of its own and as an “agency,” to borrow Blom’s central concept.20 I start the revaluation of human reality inscribed in technical reality through the work of memory performed in video-time, and build on the association between video and memory to reveal the emergence of a volume-image where memory is produced in contact with the video object. This contact usually takes place in a processual and open-ended environment exemplary of our video culture (live, feed, and story) where the volume of video images is continuously circulating and being performed within and beyond the realm of human experience. Through the work of memory and memory at work in video in particular, the concept of the volume-image revaluates the modulation of time that takes place between culture and technique in twenty-first-century media.

Memories of the Future The question of how technological advancements are ahead of sociological developments was central to the early work of philosopher of technique Bernard Stiegler. Since his first tome on Technics and Time, Stiegler questioned technical evolution as the central axiom to understand the cultural differentiations that are performed in societies. His work exemplifies a shift from an anthropogenic point of reference to a technogenic one, highlighting the value of thinking with and through the technical and technological realm. In this section of the chapter, I will focus on one museum exhibition Stiegler co-curated in the late 1980s in France prior to the publication of his first book La Technique et le Temps in 1994. My goal is to show how his vision of technology and the amateur-approach to certain skills sets (such as annotation and video editing) were made available to the public to perform sociogenic catch-up with new media technology. In a fight against the disorienting effect produced by the accumulation of new technologies, 19 Simondon 2016, p. 12. 20 See Blom 2016.

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Stiegler saw the value of working with tools to develop a savoir faire (knowhow) that could resist and surpass the alienating impact of increasingly technological development. This section of the chapter will pay particular attention to the fact that Stiegler’s experiment in sociogenic skills took place in a museum installation and was informed by the extent to which he believed in the evaluation of the technological impact on culture and skills sets. A few years after Les Immatériaux, a multi-media exhibition curated by Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput in 1986, the Centre Pompidou in Paris hosted Mémoires du Futur: Bibliothèques et Technologies (Memories of the Future: Libraries and Technologies) curated by Bernard Stiegler and Catherine Counat. Mémoires du Futur ran from October 1987 until January 1988 and focused on the impact of technological revolutions on reading skills, the public politics of library access, and the informational economy of the archive. The 600 square metres dedicated to the event addressed the condition of memory formation and memory transmission en temps lumière (at the speed of light). This new temporality was brought about by technological advancements that significantly shaped the value of memory (what is retained, archived, and preserved) as well as the industrialization of memory for the sake of the consumer. The exhibit was divided into two spaces. The first space staged the opposition between real-time information (news synchronized on a network) and the asynchronous time of the archive and its various instruments (books, sonic tapes, and optical materials). It was dedicated to the development of skills necessary to handle the tools of the library of the future.21 The second space developed a museological approach to new media and functioned as a parcours (journey) into the technological history of memory. The second space was divided into three temporal categories: invention of writing, mechanic reproduction of writing, and “speed of light archaeology” or what Stiegler later referred to as the industrialization of memory: its “proletarianization” in today’s economy.22 The goal was to show the permanency of questions regarding collective memory in societies and to point out the importance of the industrial revolution in accelerating the process of trace-making and its circulation within newly engendered networks. Mémoires du Futur focused on experimenting with newly engendered tools such as reading software and interactive systems that treated information along with archival materials (sonic, visual, and literary). Rather than exposing viewers to a set of machines, the exhibition 21 Stiegler 1986, p. 5. 22 See Stiegler 2009a.

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invited visitors to participate in workshops to develop a practice of movingimage making. Short documentary films were created from the archival materials. In the press release, the intentions of Mémoires du Futur were clear: “The computer and the electronic recording instrument reconfigure and intensify the work of memory. […] Memory is a product of technique that is in constant evolution. […] The goal of the exhibition Mémoires du Futur: Bibliothèques et Technologies is to present the main aspects of these evolutions and their consequences.”23 Visitors were given access to technological devices and encouraged to develop skills crucial to shaping their cultural relation to new media techniques. Like OVERTURE, a 16 mm piece created by multi-media artist Stan Douglas in 1988 and made of recycled materials from cinema’s earliest experiments with phantom rides, the films created in these workshops were meant to synthesize images to produce a new story out of materials from the past. Museum visitors produced films by actively selecting information to create their own memory of past events. Similar to the attention paid to the creation of new narratives from the technical memory embedded in moving images, an active selection of archival material was performed in OVERTURE to promote a certain form of “technologized perception.”24 As Erika Balsom points out, Douglas’s piece brought together “the speed of the locomotive and the mechanical eye of the cinema,” thus putting together two different conceptions of time: the standardized time of the public and the subjective time of experience shaped by involuntary memory.25 While Balsom situates the practice of using “obsolete” cinematic materials as the opening operation where cinema was reinvented in the space of art, the workshops performed at the Centre Pompidou were meant to promote a counter narrative to the hegemonic form of data collection and their informational network of distribution in today’s industrial society. Mémoires du Futur was made to disseminate a cultural awareness of the technological dimension of memory. It promoted the creation of a language made of moving images and adapted to relate to new sets of tools brought about by analogue and digital technologies. As such, the exhibit invited visitors to become image technicians.26 Here, the figure of the image technician is closely related to the figure of the amateur developed by Stiegler. Not used in opposition to the professional, or in the sense of “amateurish,” the figure 23 24 25 26

Stiegler 1986, p. 1. Balsom 2013, p. 9. Ibid., pp. 10–11. See Dillet 2017.

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of the amateur designates an individual curious to develop skills that grant access to singular modes of expression. Image technicians interacted with images in order to create a montage of events that told a different story, or shaped a different discourse, than that of the dominant media and its synchronous time frame, as seen, for example, in television news channels.

Videogram and Idiotext For contemporary philosophers of technique such as Jacques Ellul, Don Ihde, Nicole Karafyllis, and Bernard Stiegler memory and technology are intrinsically linked to one another. The becoming-present of the past through technical means is grounded in an understanding of the prosthetic dimension of memory as inscribed in technical objects, such as a notepad or a photograph. Much of this approach resides in a definition of technique as the grammatization of time, to borrow a concept developed by Bernard Stiegler and built upon Jacques Derrida’s grammatology, a method of inquiry into language change. Applied to technology, grammatization suggests that in each technical object there resides a code that captures and determines temporalities to produce a specific relation to memory and experience. Interestingly, the photograph is a technical object that requires an author who writes with light.27 Photography designates a technique geared towards the representation and reproduction of images based on chemical reactions and optical devices sensitive to light. With the advent of video technology, the screen becomes the staging of a newly engendered form of image production. The videographer, much like a photographer, is one who writes with light, yet his technical object is a videogram: a machine that grammatizes with light through and onto a screen that has a certain agency in terms of performing temporal affordances. To a certain extent, the videogram inscribes a temporal code in the image that in turn determines the possibility of an open structure and living system that Stiegler named an idiotext. The idiotext is a technical process that both sustains and surpasses the mnesic dimension of thought.28 To understand the link between videogram and idiotext and memory formation and the shift in processes of technological grammatization, in the next section of the chapter I will turn to the creative work and theoretical contributions of video pioneer Thierry Kuntzel whose entire 27 See Beller 2018. 28 Stiegler 2017, p. 88.

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body of work is an interrogation of the technical condition of experience within time. I focus on Thierry Kuntzel because he experimented with the analogico-digital image as both image and meta-image to explore the different regimes of the sensible fostered by media technology. Haunted by the relation between psychic, symbolic, and technical apparatuses, Kuntzel devoted thirty years of his life to the unfolding of the layered processes that produce the appearance and disappearance of images and coined the word videogram to further engage the relation between memory and technology. His video images oscillate between memory and imagination as a means to interrogate the passage between images—the phases that shape perception in the realm of the sensible. In this chapter, I pay tribute to my late mentor, Bernard Stiegler, who encouraged me to think, write, and finally publish parts of the dissertation he supervised on Kuntzel’s technological images. In what follows, I primarily discuss Kuntzel’s video images as artworks, and I contend that they have theoretical force qua art—specif ically in their form as video installations. Kuntzel’s work can be divided into five interconnected categories: multi-material installation (1974–2006), video work (1974–2002), video installation (1980–2007), texts about image theory (1970–1976), and texts about video (1979–1996). Because the use of different technological supports informs his attempt to question newly engendered forms of memory, I make a point to refer not only to his video work, but also to touch upon his other installations. The medium specificity of the video objects in Kuntzel resonates with the material specif icity of his installations that use morphing, photographs, neon, marble, and doors. Kuntzel’s work presents a wide variety of formats, the goal of which was to prevent the commodification of the work of art in museum settings. Much like the visitors to Mémoires du Future, Kuntzel was invested in experimenting with media technology to invent a visual language that could inscribe the fluctuation of signifiers in technological times. Moreover, by placing the artwork back in the hands of the audience, Kuntzel was investigating the agency of video objects in producing affordances that may escape and yet shape the system of exchange between the work of art and its audience. In Kuntzel’s work, the creative movement of video images took the form of a continuous attempt to postpone the possibility of a completed and closed experience of the work of art. In his artworks, writing with the moving-image device is deployed as a technique. This technique is used to ensure the viability of the textual—of that which inscribes its traces onto the realm of signifiers. In Kuntzel’s work, the continuous and fluid movement of the

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writing process is transferred into shadow and light. There is no pen, no caméra-stylo (pen-camera) either.29 The video is employed as a tool whose usage is open-ended. Closer to the brush of a painter whose techniques open up a whole world of expression, Kuntzel uses the video so that writing, in realizing its fundamental lack of coincidence with itself, would not have to interrupt its movement. Kuntzel’s work seems to deploy the idiotext that Stiegler mentions in his 1993 doctoral dissertation; namely, an open-ended structure where local processes of individuation are at work within a wider locality. This idiotext, which would have constituted the conceptual core of the fourth volume of Technics and Time, is a “memory-flux”;30 a notion that I have tried to develop, extend, and name the volume of time. In one of Kuntzel’s numerous notes, one can read his deliberate attempt to use video as a new mode of existence for writing and developing the faculty of knowing in moving-image technology: 3/2/79 (Video.) Video is this: that writing never interrupts its movement, sketch thrown like a continuous burst onto the screen, trace maintain without the fall of the trace, to project without a project. Desire, desire: it never stops.31

Writing with video is thus a modality of expression that sustains the inherent movement of the “thing” which is written about. Kuntzel aims to preserve the textual quality of the writing format while developing it onto a new technological support: that of the screen. The continuous movement of the written thing never stops; it never falls into a deathly dimension. There is no attempt to capture or to fix. On the contrary, Kuntzel’s aesthetic plays with the pulsing of colours and the modulations of light to draw the path toward another perceptual scheme. This scheme is performative in the sense that it compels its audience members to be carriers of a signifier that is in the process of becoming: a message in gestation, in genesis. Kuntzel’s work functions then as an attempt to access a space both inside and in-between images so that the message can appear as it is emerging in the realm of signification. The expressive potential of the video process relies on its ability to put time in movement: to inscribe writing as an ongoing and 29 See Astruc 1968. 30 “the idiotext: a memory-flux always already constituted through reconstitutivity’s imposing its retentional finitude on it.” Stiegler 2009, p. 242. 31 Kuntzel 2006, p. 168.

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expressive experience. In Kuntzel’s work, the absence of representation reveals the expressive movement of writing: 12/2/80 Video. s.c.r.i.p.t.e.l. speed of the letter. movement of writing. multiple writing, letters knocked about, toppled over, like: shower of marbles, electrons, atoms, “origin” of the world. Before. [Science serving as (only) a poetic mediation.]32

Refusing a closed structure of representation, Kuntzel’s work experimented with seriality in the domain of pre-figuration to create memory in flux: to develop an open field where time can be explored in the volume of the screen. Seriality appears both at the level of the art form and at the level of the themes. At the level of the form, Kuntzel has developed several installations that question the art of the tombeau, which is both a gravestone raised in memory of a deceased person and a poetic composition written by an artist. Kuntzel created alternative media formats of the written tombeaux for figures such as the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the American writers Henry James, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, the English film director Michael Powell, the Austrian-German filmmaker Fritz Lang, and the French film director Jacques Tourneur. These tombeaux deploy a reflection on the legacy of the artist as well as the transferrable quality of the artist’s work into new settings, often revealing the importance of the medium in shaping the message displayed. In the case of Le Tombeau de Saussure (Double Entrave) from 1974, the audience enters the space of a gallery-based installation where a piece of white marble is put up against a white wall. While facing the sculpture one can read, carved in the stone, a sentence from French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure: “Whether I make the letters in white or black, raised or engraved, with pen or chisel, all this is of no importance with respect to their signif ication.” This sentence, written in black capital letters onto a white and imposing marble, works both as the epitaph to what appears as Saussure’s tomb, as well as a title on 32 Kuntzel 2006, pp. 549–50.

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a monumental page. Perhaps even a frontispiece. In Thierry Kuntzel’s poetic tombeau dedicated to Saussure’s work, the tomb stands still and faces the audience in a mute dialogue between the bodies of the mobile audience and the tomb’s static letters. The object is presented in a way that emphasizes the form of the sculpture and the aesthetics of the letters as they work together to compose the medium of the installation. There is no time constraint on viewing the exhibit (within the gallery’s hours of operation), which allows the audience to have an open mode of engagement with the object, with only the space between the audience and the tomb framing the visual experience. The presence of the sculpture, which simultaneously looks like a giant page and a standing stone, visually engages audience members; the page/tomb imposes itself as an object of perception.33 If Le Tombeau de Saussure (Double Entrave) resonates with the so-called statement made by communication theorist Marshall McLuhan—”the medium is the message”—from 1956, Kuntzel’s tombeau series pushes this line of questioning even further. For him, moving-image experimentation is a means to interrogate the continuous relation between the machinery of the mind and operations of time (cutting, condensation, modulation, disappearance). In his work, the medium, and more specifically the screen and its multiple avatars (painting, frame, photograph, mirror, door), become the block from and out of which new expressive forms can arise.34 On the level of its themes, Kuntzel’s work continually questions the different modalities of experiencing time through artistic means. In this vein, Kuntzel’s work deals with notions of memory, anticipation, consciousness, and projection to continuously experiment, in the materiality of the artwork, with the opening of a field in flux. His aesthetic deploys a wide array of techniques to deepen the reflection on our experience of time and its relation to the machinery of the mind. Kuntzel sees in the video format the ideal tool to experiment with modalities of expressing time in both an analytical and theoretical way. In Time Smoking a Picture, a video installation from 1980, Kuntzel interrogates the various phases that take place between under-exposed and over-exposed images, pointing to the renunciation of an impossible image. 33 One famous tombeau is the poem by Stéphane Mallarmé dedicated to Charles Baudelaire in which the marble of Baudelaire’s tomb is compared to a seat where his shadow comes to rest. 34 Along with the poetic form of the tombeau, Kuntzel uses the shape of the triptych, such as in his video installations Abandon (Ne me quitte pas), Hiver (La mort de Robert Walser), Printemps (pas de Printemps), Été (double vue). His video installation refers to the shape of television monitors assembled into one giant square, such as in Nostos II, to the shape of photographs displayed in large format to create a gradual and spherical space in which the audience experiences the slow morphing of images, such as in Tu, in Tampico (Non Lieu), and in Une Lettre.

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This image, he recalls in a note from February 21, 1980, is the “femininity lost, forgotten, barred, denied, killed. The ‘woman’ he was, what he could have been before the choosing of his sex, the loosing of the other.”35 While the “he” refers to the man that appears on the mise-en-abyme of the frames in the video, such reflections examine the apparatus of constraints imposed upon gender. His video offers a performative modality to create images in flux: through the openess of their expressive forms these images invite us to reimagine practices of embodiment and representation. Kuntzel’s work consistently raises questions that are both theoretical and aesthetic, at the intersection of what Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze called philosophy: both a reflection and an invention of concepts that are in tune with the evolution of society. His 1984 work Nostos II imagines the passage from page to screen, in which the eye no longer has the power to separate or distinguish between images. Nostos II is an installation consisting of nine black and white video monitors set out to give the effect of cinema screen dimensions. The nine screens are connected to nine video-recorders, each playing a different tape. The video is presented as a codex—a writing tablet in which images function as hieroglyphs. Kuntzel’s piece comes out of the numerous experimentations with cybernetic principles developed in video art in the 1980s, and gives a strong entry point to the notion of cryptology in the age of digital computing.

Video-Memory The culminating moment in Thierry Kuntzel’s practice of video art in relation to memory is his interactive video installation The Waves from 2003.36 The Waves is a retro-projection of a 16/9 video (colour, sound) on a four-by-fivemetre screen placed ten centimetres above the ground. With the help of a computer and a sensor placed behind the screen, the video presents waves crashing that change according to the distance of the viewer/visitor from the sensor. The speed of the sound depends on the video, and the colour of the image depends on the visitor’s position, becoming black and white when the visitor is very close to the screen. There are no seats and no stage in the space of the installation; only the light from the waves displayed on the screen structures the empty room. At the back of a long room, there is a big picture accompanied by the sound of the sea, or to be more precise, the 35 Kuntzel 2006, p. 312. 36 In 2002, Thierry Kuntzel created a 4 min. 30 sec. video (colour, sound) titled W (THE WAVES / THE YEARS), which constitutes the first iteration of his installation The Waves.

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waves. No beach, just a thin strip of sky. Tiers of waves, the distance nearly flat, the emergence of some crests in relief, and in the foreground, waves breaking; movement and colour, like an unstable monochrome, continually re-emerging, between black, blue, grey, green, and gold; the sand engulfed by the speakers. The continuous movement of the waves invents a modality through which to connect with the spectator who anticipates the return of the waves while maintaining a subtle distance from the screen so that the audio-visual movement can be preserved. The screen is the size of an adult human being and confronts its viewer with an anthropological point of view; the ocean is shot from the water’s edge as if someone was looking at the sea. Yet the materiality of the screen itself surpasses the viewer’s corporeal ability to grasp the entirety of the movements displayed on the screen. Here the anthropological point of view is presented as a default—a non-all-encompassing one. By entering the space, the presence of the audience disturbs the flow of images and sounds. The immersive environment of the installation is affected by the presence of the audience who intrude upon the space. The viewer’s presence can modify the setting of the space through the modulation of sounds and lights to the point that when the audience gets too close to the screen the image freezes into a black and white postcard-type visual, and the sound stops. Dedicated to Virginia Woolf’s invention of time, Kuntzel’s video installation The Waves creates a relational “zone of contact”37 between the screen and the viewer. In this zone, the presence of the audience reduces motion within the work and functions as an interruption of the video-object, preventing its viewers from fully accessing the domain of experience to which the video pertains. When the viewer of The Waves interrupts the flow of the visual and sonic components of the video-object, it creates a postcard type of image that is a suspended representation of what was once an on-going movement of atmospheric modulation. The “becoming postcard of the image” is an expression used by Kuntzel in an interview conducted by Jean-Yves Jouannais.38 Kuntzel explained that he was interested in seeing, through the “becoming postcard of the image,” the transformation of a moving, sonic, and colourful image of the ocean into a black and white, muted, and fixed representation.39 Caused by the presence of the viewer in the installation, the frozen black and white image is the result of a reduction of potential of what was once an on-going vital and elemental movement. In Kuntzel’s video 37 Kuntzel 2006, p. 483. 38 Kuntzel, 2003. 39 Ibid.

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installation, the becoming postcard of the image questions the becoming moving image of memory as produced by the encounter between the media object and its audience. Here, we are not dealing with the externalization of a memory onto a technical object; on the contrary, the installation shows the modulation of time produced in contact with the video-object. It is as if Kuntzel’s video images were performing not so much for the viewer, but for the environment itself; creating an atmospheric and elemental—rather than representational—space of sensory perception. 40 The Waves challenges assumptions about spectatorship, revealing the “submedial”41 space in which video images operate: a space where the audience no longer defines the sense of time. While art historian Claire Bishop defines an installation—as opposed to an exhibition—as a work that requires the presence of spectators to complete it, I read The Waves as precisely the metacritique of this idea: the spectator is not only completing, but modulating the media experience.42 In the words of Françoise Parfait: “Paradoxically in appearance, it is under the seal of absence that the presence of the visitor can generate representation. […] Visibility is not enough to experience the installation; poly-sensoriality and the entire cerebral mobilization definitely got the better of the motionless and contemplative spectator whose disappearance Benjamin had already situated with the advent of modernity. This new ascending flâneur of Apollinaire, mobile and lonely, will have to do more to access the works; he will have to commit, enter into a relationship.”43 It is precisely this new relationship to video screens that is at the centre of my interrogation on the link between memory and technology. The viewer’s presence is relational to the screen; it functions within the installation by modulating the “zone of contact” that, in turn, modifies the unfolding of the sounds and images of the video presented. This particular approach to video leads to a conceptualization of media as a mode of producing a domain of experience that is both relational and yet cannot be fully accessed by the person who encounters it. In this case, the impossibility of experiencing the entirety of the object (the moving image stops and becomes black and white when the spectator comes too close) is not a question of scale but rather a question of operational agency. The operational agency of the video designates media objects as fully operating below and beyond our senses, in a realm no longer dictated by the human 40 41 42 43

See Hansen 2015. See Groys 2012. Bishop 2005, p. 6. Parfait 2001, pp. 167–68.

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sense of time. 44 Kuntzel’s installation reveals that what matters is not the positioning of the spectator’s experience through a unilateral encounter with a single screen but how video images constitute a relational media experience that takes place in the volume of time, in an open media field where time itself is experienced as being in flux. Two correlated elements of the video installation assume particular significance for my argument concerning the operational agency of videoobjects. First, The Waves constitutes what is called a relational environment where the media object offers its audience a form of interactive relationality in time and space. Here, the media object encapsulates a performative materiality that cannot be fully accessed by the viewer—creating temporalities that are not calibrated to the human sense of time. Second, The Waves constitutes what is called an “open-ended environment.”45 The open-ended quality of the installation allows the audience to choose the length of time they spend with the art form. The audience encounters the video as already performing and leaves the installation while the work is still running. This double structure (relational and open-ended) mimics to a certain extent the operation of social media platforms. Users engage with platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as already performing and leave them while the platforms are still running, creating the so-called FoMO effect (Fear of Missing Out) that hooks users who cannot possibly grasp the entirety of the media experience all at once. In the case of The Waves, the encounter with the screen takes place in a more intimate “zone of contact” than social media platforms. And yet, the installation operates both prior to and following the presence of the audience, much like the massive relational platforms of media technology; neither seems to need an audience to perform fully and perform beyond the realm of the media object, as experienced by the user/audience. Together, the open-ended environment and the relational aspect of The Waves position video installation art as a useful context for thinking about memory formation in today’s increasingly video-based world. The experience of spatialized time-based objects—namely, objects made of time and displayed in a representational setting—grants a heightened access to the temporal dynamics at stake in our contemporary surroundings where video images modulate multiple senses of time, including non-human ones, at the speed of light. The interaction between moving bodies and moving images can be approached both from the point of view of the temporal 44 See Hansen 2015. 45 Mondloch 2010, p. 43.

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plurality that is constitutive of modernity, as Mary Ann Doane puts it, 46 but also from the point of view of a specific, not entirely cinematic form of temporal operations that shape the volume of time, which includes past, present, and future possibilities. Indeed, rather than being positioned, the new viewing subject of video installation art is constantly negotiating time and space according to an on-going moving-media object that exceeds the realm of the viewer’s perception. This spatio-temporal negotiation on the part of the viewer demands that we contemplate memory formation from a moving-image point of view. The time-based apparatus of such an environmental network implies a shift in our understanding of memory as image-consciousness to memory as moving-image consciousness. This moving-image consciousness, in its relation to the world and to itself, not only functions like a movie (with montages, cuts, and flashbacks; or processes of condensation and displacement), but like a multiplication of fleeting and blending split-screens that no longer need us in order to perform at their fullest. It is from this newly engendered sensory framework of media experience that memory formation should be revaluated in today’s environment. Finally, according to the complexity of Kuntzel’s video installations, moving-image apparatuses can no longer be understood as a technique to make the past present and, through this operation, to synchronize in the flow of time a certain story/reading of history.47 In New Philosophy for New Media, Hansen points to the too narrow concept of technology as memory in relation to cinema. For Hansen, the matter is not how moving-image objects “function by opening perception to memory,” but how they broaden the “very threshold of perception itself, by enlarging the now of perceptual consciousness.”48 Interestingly, while Hansen offers a new critique of media objects in relation to embodiment and memory, his understanding of moving images relies on a durational modality that still conceives of time and space as fundamental categories of experience. 49 While much attention has been paid to the relation between media technology and how video images produce a newly engendered realm of sensory perception, the model of moving images used to develop a critique of new media images still relies on a filmic revaluation of movement and time inherited from the philosophy of the moving image (as seen in the work of Gilles Deleuze) 46 Doane 2002. 47 Stiegler 2010, p. 10. 48 Hansen 2004, p. 258. 49 Hansen’s notions of time, temporality, and experience are grounded in a Bergsonian understanding of matter, duration, and memory.

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and the philosophy of technique (as seen in the work of Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler).50 For Deleuze, such revaluation started from the assumption that time ceased to be the measurement of movement. In his two books on cinema, Deleuze draws a parallel between a revolution that took place in philosophy (where movement became subordinate to time, as analysed by Bergson) and the evolution of cinema after World War II. In the context of modern cinema, the emergence of a new kind of cinematographic and mental image found its roots in the crisis of both the “action-image” and the American Dream, illustrated by Italian neorealism (around 1948) and the French New Wave (around 1958). For Deleuze, the images were linked by “false continuity and irrational cuts,” outlining that the “present” is no longer understood as the image, but as what the “image represents.”51 This approach to time and movement relied completely on the viewing subject of cinema, whose positionality was central in determining the time-signatures of cinematography.

Moving-Image Memory By steering away from the cinematic form of representation, The Waves radicalizes the image displayed on screen and opens up a space of visual intensities where the ideogram can perform within an idiotex; a technique that produces an open-ended temporal flux where memory and perception are seen at work. The representational space of the installation becomes the critical stage52 from which moving images can be questioned, repositioned, and extended to include the multi-layered intensities constitutive of the volume-image. As Raymond Bellour suggests, what matters is not how video is not cinema, but rather how video renews the conditions of the cinema-image.53 The central operation of video-time is the modulation of light to create diverse temporal speeds. In Kuntzel’s The Waves, the screen becomes the visual field onto which processes of remembrance and disappearance are explored in volume. While the filmic time/movement image relied on a prosthetic definition of memory, the volume-image of video posits that memory performs in relation to multiple temporalities. In his work, Kuntzel makes the unfolding and modulation of time the vector through which to negotiate new forms of visual 50 51 52 53

See Derrida 1967; Derrida and Stiegler 1996; Stiegler 2001. Deleuze 1989, p. 3. The idea of the theatricality of video art is brilliantly developed by Mathilde Roman 2016. Bellour 2013, p. 172.

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intensities. At the heart of these intensities, memory becomes a matter of fluctuation and surfacing. Here, the notion of technique, understood as that which grammatizes time, is expanded to take into account the volume of time as that which simultaneously modulates various temporalities.54 The volume-image of video produces a temporal movement that encapsulates different temporalities operating simultaneously. These temporalities are understood as a volume of intensities that is negotiated through the viewer’s interaction. Video-time signatures take processes, such as condensation and displacement, repetition and modification of forms inherent to the filmic experience, outside of the narrative constraint and its temporal unity to experiment with multi-layered temporalities within the single unit of the videotape. The video screens create intensities of light and depth and become a surface to make visible the unfolding of time. This understanding of the screen as a surface is central to the volume-image of video. As media theorist Giuliana Bruno points out in her meditation on the layers of depth unfolding on screens, the surface is a “generative and defining aspect of the aesthetics of modernity.”55 From the surface of media emerges “a non-linear sense of time and layers of temporal density.”56 Because the modulation of time is the main operation that appears on screen, the emergence of a volume-image in video technology has consequences for our understanding of memory. Memory is no longer conceived as a stable trace that emerges from the past to inhabit the present of an experience. On the contrary, in video-time memory becomes a matter of light, a trace that can be erased and traced again, where appearance and disappearance constitute the pulse and the rhythm of the video image. Video-time morphs the screen into a surface where memory is seen at work in a volume. Kuntzel’s attempt to manifest images as if they were emerging out of the video-object itself is important to his media aesthetics: Unlike projection-cinema, the picture comes as if from the interior, from the back of the screen—from the “canvas,” from the blank space—to materialize the “depth” of the block, inf inite depth, language-image volume, from which each utterance, each particular image seems to spring, to rise up (surface of the screen, skin, contact zone, my eye against this skin: gaze).57 54 55 56 57

See Derrida 1967; Stiegler 2001. Bruno 2014, p. 55. Ibid., p. 116. Kuntzel 2006, p. 483.

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The surface of the video screen allows us to see time as an image in volume from which to interrogate the emergence of technically produced time and movement. To address the emergence of a new kind of memory at work in electronically produced technology, Kuntzel refers to the video screen as a “videogram.” According to Kuntzel, “Taking up the motifs again, all treated as flat surfaces, the videogram becomes a volume: images placed one on top of the other—a memory volume.”58 The videogram is a tool with which Kuntzel writes with light. The trace is that of a lighting brush that emerges in space, thus making visible the unfolding of time. Through series of traces, the screen functions as the chromatic revealer of shapes. Images manifest themselves like a precipitate during a chemical reaction; the screen is the liquid from which the visual emerges. In her essay “Entre, dessus/dessous, à peine, imperceptiblement…” Anne-Marie Duguet has distilled the process of writing with light central to Kuntzel’s videogram, and its consequences for memory: It is not a random project of modern flatness that this palimpsestic screen raises, but an analogy with ‘screen memory’, a zone of outcrop made of psychic events, a spawning view. […] Additionally, the electronic surface is always available for new inscriptions in a writing-pad fashion similar to the one that is compared to the functioning of the psychic apparatus by Freud.59

Duguet thus underlines a fundamental aspect of Kuntzel’s video work: the palimpsestic quality of Kuntzel’s video screen recalls the particular functioning of “screen memory,” or “screen memories” as Sigmund Freud referred to them; a process through which a memory functions to hide a mental, usually unconscious, content. Central to these mechanisms of screen memories is the replacement of a psychic content by a memory-image that is exempt from the important and shocking elements tied to the original event. However, while Kuntzel did refer to a Freudian understanding of memory as analogous to both psychic and filmic apparatuses, I aim to show that his videograms, and his installation The Waves in particular, push us to revaluate our understanding of time and the layering processes of memory at play in video images. Famously deployed as an example by Freud in “A Note on the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’” from 1925, the writing pad is a device made of two distinct 58 Kuntzel 2006 dvd-rom, section archive. 59 Duguet 2001, pp. 64–65.

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layers: brown wax and transparent paper. With this writing tablet one can write, erase, and write again. Freud saw in the device a fruitful combination of two mnesic systems: one that receives (input), and one that retains it (storage). The interesting aspect of the tablet is that it allows one to have both an “unlimited receptive capacity”—one can write infinitely on the same sheet—and a “retention of permanent traces”—all writing traces are permanently inscribed in the wax of the writing pad.60 Freud contrasts the device of the writing pad, which was new at the time, with more traditional mnesic techniques. Simple notes in writing, often used to enhance memory function, require their users to know where they are deposited in order to be reproduced in an exact and unaltered way. Freud compared the paper cover with the system of perception-consciousness and its protective shield, the wax slab with the unconscious behind it, and the appearance and disappearance of the writing with the flickering-up and passing away of consciousness in the process of perception.61 At stake here is a process of selection, organization, and classification that is tied to making memory relevant for consciousness. What Kuntzel develops in The Waves comes from a long commitment to critically engaging the relation between memory and consciousness when the viewing subject is exposed to media technologies. In an article titled “A Note upon the Filmic Apparatus” published in 1976, Kuntzel pointed out that Freud’s discussion of the mind’s perceptive system and its mnesic functions misses an important characteristic of the mental apparatus in its analogy with the writing tablet. Similar to the perceptive apparatus of the mind, the writing pad is composed of an external layer that filters the stimuli coming in—this function is performed by the transparent sheet—and of an internal layer that retains the stimuli—this function is performed by the wax. However, contrary to the system of perception-consciousness as developed by Freud, “which receives perceptions but retains no permanent trace of them”62 at the level of consciousness, the writing pad has the capacity to leave permanent traces on the wax. The wax itself becomes the central 60 Questioning processes of retrieval is particularly relevant when such ‘simple notes in writing’ are accessed through locked technological devices. Along these lines, any computer user can remember the experience of facing the screen of their computer and having forgotten their password, thereby being prevented from accessing their content (emails, photos, bank information). In such cases, screens act as gatekeepers to stored information, and require users to adjust to new processes of retrieval that are implemented by the device itself. I thank John Mowitt for the discussion on this topic. 61 Freud 1925, p. 211. 62 Freud 1925, p. 208.

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characteristic of the writing pad in its analogy to the unconscious. The top sheet represents the infinite possibilities of perception, and the wax represents the place where retained traces are kept after being cleared from consciousness.63 Three major aspects of the analogy between the writing tablet and the mental apparatus do not apply. First, in Freud’s explanation, it seems like the tablet accidentally retains all the traces. The traces left on the wax have no function for the apparatus of the writing pad, which is not the case with memory in its relation to consciousness. Freud did not grasp the imaginative function of recollection in shaping the process of retention. Second, old traces cannot emerge from the wax onto the writing pad, which is the case with the functioning of memory; memories can suddenly emerge from the unconscious to conscious. The plasticity of the function of recollection in relation to consciousness is essential if one is to address the movementmemory nexus central to the experience of the sensible. Third, the model of the writing pad lacks movement. While writing itself implies movement, the retention of these written traces is motionless on the writing pad. By contrast, the mental apparatus is made of temporal layers that fluctuate, thus creating a metastable psychic environment that does not match the static model of inscription implied by Freud’s writing pad. Kuntzel replaces Freud’s model of the writing pad with the filmic apparatus and sees the latter as an improvement as it allows two moving mechanisms to perfectly mirror each other: the mechanism of perception and the mechanism of inscription. Kuntzel draws on Freud’s analogy, but extends it to think the movement-memory nexus in terms of image projection. For Kuntzel, it is precisely the functioning of the cinematic machinery that accounts for the functioning of the psychic apparatus. In doing this, Kuntzel distances himself from cinema’s narrative-representative patterns and its capacity to represent our mental abstractions.64 Kuntzel sees the connection between the filmic apparatus and the psychic one operating as follows: “the screen serving as the covering sheet” and the “celluloid, as the wax.”65 Still relying on the Freudian analogy, Kuntzel proposes a theoretical reconsideration of the moving image as built on the same model as the mental apparatus, both perceptive and retentive. This model permits one to think of the processes of condensation and displacement, central to the imagery of the unconscious for Freud, as analogous to the movement of the 63 Kuntzel 1976, p. 208. 64 Kuntzel 2006, p. 471. 65 Ibid., p. 473.

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moving image apparatus. For Kuntzel, the functioning of the unconscious and film-work are analogous to the moving image machinery.66

Video-Work Yet, Kuntzel’s optical choice in favour of the film apparatus does not stop at the level of theoretical analogy. In his video practices, as seen in The Waves, Kuntzel pushes the correlations between the mental and technical apparatus further to inscribe the volume of time as a central characteristic of the psychic functioning of image-making. By experimenting with video as a device to write with light in the volume of the image, Kuntzel collapses the division between the screen and the celluloid to reveal the depth/colour/ shape of time. To him, video itself is “regarded as the very materialization of the block.”67 While in cinema there is the possibility to detach “a picture from the tape strip, to select a piece of the film,” in video, as Kuntzel points out, “the picture is invisible on the tape, it appears only on the screen.”68 The screen of video does not distinguish between that which is projected and that which is retained in the image; on the contrary, it assembles the multiplicities of temporal intensities to create the volume of video-time. Time becomes flow, images become variations of intensities, and traces appear to create the volume of time. For Kuntzel, the thick and opaque surface of the video screen allows for the analogy between mental apparatus and technical device to be completed. The video as an apparatus of trace-formation becomes the operational tool to experiment with mechanisms of inscription, projection, and perception along with mechanisms of memory formation such as input, output, and storage. For Kuntzel, the video-object accounts for the functioning of the system of the unconscious, the memory formation tied into it, and its relation to the system of perception-consciousness. Preoccupied by the mental machinery of image production, Kuntzel’s video work explores the screen as a “zone” from which the system of perception-consciousness is made 66 Renowned theorist Thomas Elsaesser points out the necessity of rethinking Freud’s legacy with respect to technical media. While Elsaesser’s article provides one of the rare accounts of the relation between technical media and Freud’s theory of the psyche as an optical machinery of trace inscription, unfortunately, the article does not address how the medium of video provides a useful tool to revaluate the Freudian framework of memory in its analogy to technical devices. Elsaesser 2011, p. 96. 67 Kuntzel 2006, p. 486. 68 Ibid., p. 495.

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visible. As previously mentioned, the video is a “zone of contact” where forms, such as lights, colours, and shapes manifest themselves onto the surface of the screen. Important to Kuntzel’s media aesthetics is his attempt to manifest images as if they were emerging out of the video-object itself, in video-time, to express what Kuntzel calls “the mad desire to make light visible.”69 The unfolding of lights and the passing of time give shape to the volume of video and create a zone where memory traces can be in contact to rewrite the relation between culture and technique. Central to the media experience in Kuntzel’s work is an internal movement—the brush of time, the beam of light—that pertains to the image. The images on screen are given an internal movement—a dynamic one—that is the result of the assemblage of different time patterns. The space between culture and technique is a memory-volume where mnesic traces are in movement. This movement takes place in a “zone of contact” where the video-object creates the volume of video-time. Kuntzel’s work thus raises the question of memory formation—a process of perception/reception and inscription/storage—from the point of view of the conditions that allow for the experience of memory to emerge and to unfold in the realm of the technical. By creating an emerging world of trace formation, the screen suggests the volume of images and its perception by the viewer. Through the appearance and disappearance of lighting traces, the surface of the screen is analogous to the surface of consciousness where memory and the passing of images cannot be separated from one another. What emerges and what remains, what appears and disappears, constitutes a mental volume explored in video-time. The flow of mental content, whether conscious or unconscious, is a volume made of different patterns of time creating a f low that is analogous to the machinery of the video image. The surface of the screen, taken as a block of persistent malleability and motility, allows Kuntzel to question the work of memory and memory-at-work in video. It engages in a reflection concerning which traces are retained from the traces that have been induced, experienced, and erased. It is within this fluctuating work of the trace found in Kuntzel’s videogram that an economy of différance emerges in video-time. In his essay “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Derrida locates the economy of différance in the body of the writing trace. For Derrida, Freud’s psychographic metaphor of the writing pad has theoretical value inasmuch as it allows for thinking about the economy of différance as constitutive of 69 Ibid., p. 468.

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memory, and memory as the constitutive essence of the psyche.70 The trace is the condition of différance understood as that which is invisible and unreachable, spawning in-between moments of impression. In this sense, and alongside Kuntzel’s interest in the genesis of images, time is an a priori trace before it unfolds as a determination. Made of light, and more precisely of lighting signals, the electronic images produce visual fluctuations on the screen that recall the functioning of the psychic apparatus as a machinery of trace production. “Pure time flow” says Kuntzel’s video; “pure temporalisation” says Derrida’s essay. In between these two stands the need to update Freud’s reference to the writing pad. Derrida sees in Freud’s text on the Wunderblock (the mystic writing pad) an opportunity to account for the work of the psyche as a work of spacing layers. A topography of traces, a map of spawning touches: the writing device is a stage onto which the psychic milieu gives shape to its untouchable, unreachable mnesic traces. It is within this “lithography from before the words” that Derrida inscribes the work of différance that conditions the spacing of time.71 Writing within writing, writing before the words: for Derrida the poet is one who invents his own grammar. For Kuntzel, the poet is an “image technician” who writes through lighting signals in the volume of time.72 I see in Kuntzel’s videograms the invention of a memory-volume where traces exceed the realm of human perception. Image from before the image; flows of intensities tint the surface to give time its malleable force; its fluctuating strength emerging out of the screen. There is no simple translation at work in the image, only modalities of transductive forces shaping the realm of the emergence of the image as a composition of temporal intensities.

Mnesic-World and the Digital Present While the externalization of memory onto technical supports—such as writing a note, downloading a picture, or creating a f ile—was mainly performed by individuals for their individual uses, the digital introduces a significant shift in the production and transmission of memory supported by technical means. Memory is not only prosthetic: a technical addition or supplement that augments the capacity to retain information exteriorized onto technical objects. Memory has become aphaeretic (from apharein 70 Derrida 1967, p. 299. 71 Ibid., p. 307. 72 Spielmann 2008, p. 73.

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in Greek; to take away): it is extracted by external and interconnected devices that run at an infra level.73 While prosthetic memory meant that the individual could retrieve the information he or she willingly exteriorized onto a technical device, the aphaeretic dimension of memory defines the extractive dimension of devices that track and collect information onto platform and data banks. Cell phones, tablets, and computers do not simply help us keep track of events, phone numbers, and birthdates; they algorithmically extract data from us and store it in “ubiquitous networks and distributed digital storage devices.”74 The speed at which algorithms track, capture, and stock information is superseding the enduring process of mnesic trace formation and its sedimentation and evolution over time. The aphaeretic dimension of memory and the overflowing amount of stored information in technical supports destabilizes both processes of selection and recollection, flooding the individual with data that he or she can no longer access and process on his or her own. The ever-expanding horizon of mnesic devices disarms the individual by destroying his or her ability to make a decision based on his or her own data bank, i.e., organic memory. This algorithmic mode of extraction, i.e., data-mining, has created a global network of aphaeretic memory that is in constant expansion. Not only do algorithms extract data from us, but they also transform this data according to a set of instructions to which we lack any access.75 Here the figure of the programmer plays an important role in both creating a set of instructions and developing a platform from which data can be accessed. In the age of Big Data, the figure of the programmer carries the weight of enabling a paradox: he is the person in charge of opening a set of instructions to be performed, and yet no one else should have access to the encoding structure he creates. With such a figure in mind, one can sense the paradox of the notion of access in “open access.” This expansion occurs at the speed of light, leaving no time for humans to catch up with the applied formulas that are producing data before and around them. Media no longer run for us, instead they have become thoroughly embedded in our environments, acting at an infrastructural level to shape the very ground of our perceptions and experiences. Media such as cell phones, GPSs, smart TVs, and computers are generating data that anticipate our future choices for us. A decisive shift in temporal orientation thus takes place. Whereas memory was an act of commemoration, a means through which one makes sense of the past, 73 Nony 2017a, p. 133. 74 Goodman and Parisi 2010, p. 343. 75 Nony 2017b, p. 102.

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computer storage looks towards the future, revealing the programme-driven quality of video operations.

Conclusion This chapter aimed to tackle the shift that tertiary retention faces in a world where media can no longer be conceptualized as mere prosthesis for expanding cognitive capacities. I asked: What if we read Big Data as an ever-expanding network of aphaeretic memory that has a material agency of its own, not as a mere consequence of the finitude of our retentive capacities, but as a symptom of the development of a memory-environment where the subject is more of a reject, rather than an agent, of the milieu in which he or she evolves? By agency, I referred to the media object’s capacity to operate by rejecting or bypassing the realm of our sensory experience. In this context, I questioned the relationship between memory and the moving image to revaluate the milieu in which human and machine co-evolve. Such a relationship disrupts the metastable environment between human and technology. In this chapter, I asked how digital platforms are reconfiguring relations to memory in networked societies. I focused on understanding how multiple temporalities produced by video technologies, what I called the volume-image of media technologies, are shaping sociogenesis. Specifically, I examined how the rise of Big Data reconfigures the selection, recollection, and retention dynamics at the core of human memory, and I paid particular attention to the data-driven dimension of today’s futurity. In questioning memory in relation to media futurity—that is, media’s tendency toward programmability—this chapter considered the performative agency of media objects as operating in a proliferating technoscape of aphaeretic memory. I end here with disorientation: the disturbing and disrupting effect of the accumulation of speed performed by new media technologies. The temporal orientation of technologically mediated culture shapes the behavioural development of an individual in society by imposing disruptive76 shortcircuiting of the relation between memory, experience, and projection. These three operations remain central to the faculties of knowing and desiring, and have been at the forefront of debates concerning the impact of technique and time in industrialized societies.77 The cultural layers inscribed between human and technical objects are the determining factors 76 See Stiegler 2018. 77 See Stiegler 1996.

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that condition and dictate the retention/recollection process grounded in technical objects. Technique is paired with a cultural relation that drastically changes the way one handles a technical object to retain, transform, and transmit information. As Gilbert Simondon puts it: “Culture and technique cannot be complementary in a static position; they may only become so through a cinematic process of tilting and inversion under a regime whose appropriation to each issue is perhaps the most important task that philosophy’s effort could propose to attend to.”78 Kuntzel’s video work not only makes visible the technical conditions that allow an individual to experience time as always in flight, but also anticipates the new connections between individuals and media environments that are shaping our lives today. By experimenting with computer-generated imagery, Kuntzel’s later work foresees the dynamic connection that is created between media objects and psychic and collective entities. To critically engage the notion of memory today, we need to account for temporal operations that are being performed beyond or below our sensory-motor perception. Doing so allows us to question the operational agency of electronic events. In today’s new media world, we are dealing with an open-ended media environment in which media objects have a material agency of their own. With operational agency, these objects not only generate sensory experience, but call into question new ways of using technical memory—as seen in the collection and use of data by third parties. The operational agency of new media objects allows us, on the one hand, to question how the technoscape of media objects actually operates at the level of memory formation; on the other hand, the relational aspect of such an environment requires us to think of the user as a disruptive force in relation to an operative media performance. Extending this connection between video work and our environment, I would like to address the predatory dimension of data extraction and memory externalization—as exemplified by the instrumentalization of data in today’s political economy. The on-going expansion of a global network of digital memory is not only fed by the constant uploading of data by individuals onto clouds and social networks. Digital platforms are produced precisely through the extraction of data from a realm of sensory experience that we cannot access, before the user can register information as information. Furthermore, it is in the lack of access to the data that are extracted from our daily life that the political stakes of memory formation and knowledge formation reside today. Much attention has been paid to the question of privacy and security in the use 78 Simondon, 2014, p. 329.

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and misuse of such data by third parties—an important problem that remains unsolved. Data-mining processes that operate below our sensory capacities drastically remodel our ability to perceive, retain, and recollect information, and it is from this framework that artificial intelligence and knowledge formation need to be evaluated today: a framework in which the human no longer stands as the main reference. In today’s digital society, where behaviours are shaped by new and addictive technologies, we need to reassess our ability to anticipate technological changes to come. I see these reassessments taking place in the art world but also in the classroom, where new ways of relating to memory, knowledge, and experience need to be fostered. It is in this proliferating digital environment, where machines interact with other machines, that a performative theory of memory displacement assumes its truest and most urgent value.

Works Cited Astruc, Alexandre. “The Birth of a New Avant-Barde: La Camera-Stylo.” In The New Wave (1968): 17–23. https://soma.sbcc.edu/users/davega/xNON_ACTIVE_CLASSES/FILMST_113/Filmst113_ExFilm_Movements/FrenchNewWave/ cameraStylo.pdf. Bal, Mieke. Thinking in Film: The Politics of Video Art Installation According to Eija-Liisa Ahtila. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Balsom, Erika. Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013. Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of Spectacle. Lebanon: University Press of New England, 2006. Beller, Jonathan. The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Bishop, Claire. 2005. Installation Art: A Critical History. New York: Routledge. Blom, Ina. The Autobiography of Video: The Life and Times of a Memory Technology. Berlin: Sternberg, 2016. Bruno, Giuliana. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014. Chun, Wendy. “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2008): 148–71. https://doi.org/10.1086/595632. Chun, Wendy. Programmed Vision: Software and Memory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement. Paris: Critique, 1983. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma 2: L’image-temps. Paris: Critique, 1985.

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Dillet, Benoît. “Proletarianization, Deproletarianization, and the Rise of the Amateur.” Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 44, no. 1(2017): 79–105. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-3725881. Dillet, Benoît, and Anaïs Nony. “Introduction: Noology and Technics.” London Journal of Critical Thought 1, no. 1(2016): 26–37. http://londoncritical.org/wpcontent/uploads/2016/06/LJCT2016V1I1-Noology.pdf. Derrida, Jacques. “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 73–117. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/2929625?origin=JSTOR-pdf&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents. Derrida, Jacques. L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967. Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. Echographies de la télévision. Paris: Galilée, 1996. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Duguet, Anne-Marie. Déjouer l’image, créations électroniques et numériques. Paris: J. Chambon, 2001. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Freud and the Technical Media: The Enduring Magic of the Wunderblock.” In Media Archaeology, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, 95–115. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2011. Freud, Sigmund. General Psychological Theory. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1925. http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-04-28.9188053100. Freud, Sigmund. “Screen Memories.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (SE3), edited by James Strachey, 301–22. London: Hogarth Press, 1899. Goodman, Steve, and Luciana Parisi. “Machines of Memory.” In Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, edited by Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, 343–63. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Groys, Boris. Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media. Translated by Carsten Strathausen. New York City: Columbia University Press, 2012. Hansen, Mark B. N. Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Hansen, Mark B. N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Jameson, Frederic. Potsmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Kuntzel, Thierry. “A Note Upon the Filmic Apparatus.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 1, no. 3 (1976): 266–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509207609360953. Kuntzel, Thierry. “L’Eau.” Interview with Jean-Yves Jouannais. Arte, 2003. Film, 10:48. https://vimeo.com/58473589. Kuntzel, Thierry. “Le Défilement: A View in Close-Up.” Translated by Bertrand Augst, Camera Obscura 1, no. 2 (1977): 50–66. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-1-2_2-50.

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Kuntzel, Thierry. Title TK. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2006. Mondloch, Kate. Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Nony, Anaïs. “Anxiety in the Society of Preemption: On Simondon and the Noopolitics of the Milieu.” La Deleuziana 6 (2017b): 102–10. http://www.ladeleuziana. org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Deleuziana6_102-110_Nony.pdf. Nony, Anaïs. “Nootechnics of the Digital.” Parallax 23, no. 2 (2017a): 129–46. https:// www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13534645.2017.1299293. Parfait, Françoise. Vidéo: un art contemporain. Paris: Éditions du regard, 2001. Roman, Mathilde. On Stage: The Theatrical Dimension of Video Image. Translated by Charles Penwarden. Bristol: Intellect, 2016. Rouvroy, Antoinette, and Thomas Berns. “Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d’émancipation.” Réseaux 1, no. 177 (2013): 163–96. https://www. cairn.info/revue-reseaux-2013-1-page-163.htm. Scarlett, Ashley, and Martin Zeilinger. “Rethinking Affordance.” Media Theory 3. no. 1 (2019):1–48. https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/ mt/article/view/78. Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Simondon, Gilbert. Sur la Technique (1953–1983). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014. Spielmann, Yvonne. Video: The Reflexive Medium. Translated by Anja Well and Stan Jone. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. Stiegler, Bernard. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009a. Stiegler, Bernard. La technique et le temps 3. Le temps du cinéma et la question du mal-être. Paris: Galilée, 2001. Stiegler, Bernard. Mémoires du Future. Bibliothèque et technologies. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1986. Stiegler, Bernard. ‘The New Conflicts of the Faculties and Functions: Quasi-causality and Serendipity in the Anthropocene.’ Qui Parle 26, no. 1 (June 2017): 79–99. https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-3822421. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 2. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009b. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.

2.

Zones of Modulation: Video as a SpaceCritical Medium Abstract: The second chapter considers the subversive images manifest in the work of Fiona Tan, Nil Yalter, and Zineb Sedira. In their respective works, these artists present video images as performing narratives to question the imperial gaze. In this chapter, I build on Gayatri Spivak’s concept of the native informant and Chela Sandoval’s notion of topography to argue that the performative image of video technology can be unruly in relation to the dominant structure of representation. Placing Tan, Yalter, and Sedira in conversation, I also ponder how performative technology as methodology remembers or forgets history and undoes or scrolls through colonization and the coloniality of visual culture often transmitted by media technology. Keywords: video, space, modulation, Fiona Tan, Nil Yalter, Zineb Sedira

This new cartography is best thought of not as typology, but as a topography of consciousness in opposition, from the Greek work topos or place, for it represents the charting of psychic and material realities that occupy a particular region. This cultural topography delineates a set of critical points within which individuals and groups seeking to transform dominant and oppressive powers can constitute themselves as resistant and oppositional citizen-subjects. – Chela Sandoval 1

May I call your attention to space in relation to video technologies, not only their pervasive proliferation in our environment but the performative potential they manifest? First, the aesthetic connection between the historical realities they can capture: their capacity to retain and transmit information outside of mainstream channels. Second, the relation between the space 1

Sandoval 2000, p. 54.

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where the images are taken and the places where these images are transmitted: their capacity to activate significations and create spatial resonances. I take these two modalities of capture and transmission as central to the performative potential of video technologies. It is this potential and the subversive nature of video works that gives shape to a new cartography of meaning, where power dynamics can be regarded anew. Here, I make use of Chela Sandoval’s notion of the “topography of consciousness in opposition” because she allows us to think about space as a transformative position: to establish it as a modality to reinvent psychic and material realities and to constitute resistant subjects to orders of domination and oppression. Sandoval’s new cartography maps a rhetoric of resistance to focus on a “hermeneutics of love in the postmodern world.”2 By concentrating on the lapses in law and sovereignty, Sandoval advocates for a methodology of the oppressed as a deregulating system; one that encourages the intensification of renewal and social reconstruction through various technologies: “semiotics, deconstruction, meta-ideologizing, democratics, and differential movement.”3 I would like now to investigate her approach within the realm of an information society that imposes a new global world order where information functions as a regulatory neocolonial and imperialist force.4 My aim here will be to use the disruptive potential of Sandoval’s method to show that video technologies have been and can continue to be a revolutionary force; defiant and unruly of the global system of informational exchange and their platform of computational capitalism. To investigate the performative potential of video technology as an unruly force in relation to the dominant structure of representation I begin with a concept called “modulation,” which Gilbert Simondon describes as a change in intensity; a passage from one frequency to another. For Simondon, “le vivant est ce qui module”5 (“the living is that which modulates”); meaning that a living entity is a process that can be defined by its capacity to modulate its energy and thus its relation to its environment. I want to think about what it means for a living entity to continuously revive its liveliness by modulating various information in order to survive. I am interested in the ways in which “the living” modulates information at a time when the introduction of electrical power governs changes in both psychic and social environments. Keeping in mind that le vivant (the living) has the capacity 2 3 4 5

Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 10. See Beller 2018. Simondon 1989, p. 143.

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to determine the information it needs in order to best modulate its energy, I ask what it would be mean to think about living entities—that which gives information to itself to better understand the problem it needs to solve6 —in a world shaped by informational technology; that is, a world governed by the electrification of life itself. In addition to other concerns (ontology, form, operation), Simondon’s book L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information helps us to begin answering that question because it both describes and seeks to enact a philosophical method inspired by informational technology. Simondon’s book, which designates a process of individuation as a “system within a system” that is constantly negotiating various scales of informational intensities, and where the individual is understood as un nœud de communication informative (“a node of communicative information”),7 sets me to thinking about contemporary video practices and their impact on the living. I am interested in video technology within the context of an increasingly expanding global tech order and understand the notion of information according to three, often concomitant, operations: information is the operation of giving shape (modelling), of transmitting (communicating), and of assigning a judicial status (commanding). In the context of communication science, information designates the shaping of matter into a recognizable form (from the Latin informare, to give shape) and the transmission of a message according to specific codes and symbols. I consciously make an analogy here between a living being known for its capacity to select the information it needs and the electronic field of video technology, which is a technology that has the agency to produce information without recording content. This analogy between video technologies and living entities is a rhetorical tool I use to further investigate notions of liveness, agency, and oppositional consciousness, and how individuals select the information they need in a world increasingly governed by cybernetic power.8 In communication technology, modelling, communicating, and commanding structure the informational trajectory of a society by modulating the messages that are transmitted. Modulation is the liminal operation taking place between various energetic intensities. Video technology often reveals that another gaze is writing the video sequence as it unfolds: video-graphy as a video-technology modulates the ambivalent power of seeing, witnessing, and archiving the event. This book on the performative 6 Ibid., p. 144. 7 Ibid., p. 28. 8 Nony 2019, p. 732.

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dimension of video imagery understands modulation as a moving-image operation produced for the viewer who is challenged to engage in the act of viewing. One purpose of this chapter is to interrogate video technology as an informational technology cohabiting with the living. This cohabitation produces “zones of modulation” that can orient and disorient the informational trajectory of a society, revealing the dominant order of a state as well as the subversive potential of topographies to create singular modes of existence with moving-image technology. Zones of modulation designate spaces where operations modulate, communicate, and command new information. I engage the idea of “zones of modulation”—namely, the spatiality of the informational technology—when the video (as image and apparatus) activates the space in subversive ways. A zone is an indetermined, mobile, and liminal space where singular and intensive operations take place.9 The distinct quality of a zone is determined by the operation it performs in time and space. The operation can be extensive or intensive and varies according to the flux of energies modulated within that zone. I am interested in the zones of modulation produced by video technology because in them I see the constant negotiation of extensive/intensive flux in an environment. I believe that this negotiation allows for alternative topographies of sensing and knowing. The works of Fiona Tan, Nil Yalter, and Zineb Sedira offer subversive video practices that help create alternative narratives around knowledge and representation. The subversive dimension of their video practices is seen as a déréglement (un-ruling) of site-specific events where various power dynamics are at stake including language and identity. Un-ruling refers to the defiance of rules, their undoing, deconstruction, and the re-ordering of their framework of reference. It also refers to déroulement (rolling out) the display and continuity of the video signal where a certain moving-image ritual can be repeated in time. This déréglement and déroulement undoes the linguistic sphere of operation to modulate information, and to perform other narratives that stand in opposition to hegemonic tendencies often deployed by mass media.10 What video does to spaces of control, meaning, bodily presence, and knowledge production can be appreciated by diving into the many environments that have been activated by communication technology. I like the verb “to activate” because it functions as an informational révélateur: a developing solution that is used in chemistry to detect the presence of another component. I choose to interrogate how video operates 9 Etelain 2017, pp. 115–16. 10 Jameson 1991, p. 37.

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as a zone of spatial modulation; how video technology reveals and activates the forces at play in an environment; how it detects and selects information by technological means to write in the gaze of the seeing subject. I am interested in the video work of Fiona Tan, Nil Yalter, and Zineb Sedira because it creates various zones of “transgressive” and “authentic” modulations, two categories central to performance studies that displace the paradigm of representation.11 These zones of modulation disrupt dominant frameworks of intelligibility within the logics of both mass media and museum exhibitions. They unsettle you, the viewer, in your own act of viewing, reminding you of the embodied historicity of language, textuality, and architecture, asking you to position yourself, to anchor yourself, even temporarily, in the various stories at play in one place. In this chapter, I look at how Tan, Yalter, and Sedira’s videos work to modulate information about exile, identity, and language, and how they offer tools to examine dominant structures of representation in France. Their singular video practices inform the complex historiography of land inhabitancy within an imperial state, and the technology involved in creating a conscious relation to the historical order in place. I see in their work images that perform significations to produce knowledge in their own name, enacting codes that reflect their own modalities of inhabiting space. In the case of the work selected and studied in this chapter, all three artists, though each in their own way, use video’s potential to offer a meditation on the question of information, history, and the figure of the informant as articulated in France’s postcolonial context. The commonality between Fiona Tan, Nil Yalter, and Zineb Sedira is that these artists showed and/or made the works discussed in this chapter in France. I am thus less interested in whether these artists are French or Francophone or not. Their biographies are as complex as the network of signification their works of art create. What I focus on instead is how their video work (as image and apparatus) reveals and disrupts the historical and geopolitical context of art viewing in France: what was shown, how, by whom, and for which audience. As such, their work offers a spatial regime where their use of video exposes the performative dimension of the image to activate places of knowledge transmission and embodied experience. In their work, I take modulation as a form of utterance: an act that questions its modes of representation as much as it performs acts of recognition. Specifically, I investigate the documentary footage in Fiona Tan’s Tuareg, the body of the racialized woman in Nil Yalter’s La danse du ventre and Lapidation, and the matrimonial lineage of language in exile in Zined Sedira’s 11 Taylor 2003, pp. 9–14.

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Monther Tongue. In these works, video’s zone of modulation creates operative localities where utterance and recognition activate various narratives and stories about the gaze of the ethnographic subject. These operative localities subvert what one can easily know about a topic and request new interpretative tools of knowledge and technology. I believe the artists studied in this chapter refuse to be assigned to one positionality and do not consent to being a single being.12 They do so, I argue, by engaging the space-critical dimension of video technology, and deploy video’s technological force to modulate our understanding of history. This chapter focuses on video as a space-critical medium. The question of space is central to video technology because video is a self-contained recording system. The battery-powered object that could now be operated by one-person infiltrated spaces that the filmic image could not access. Very quickly after its public commercialization in the ’70s, video technology infiltrated spaces of power such as news broadcasts, protests, and factories, but also museums as well as the intimate spaces of the home. I like the verb “to infiltrate” because it speaks to the necessity of video to operate discretely, sometimes under cover, and not to expose in plain sight the tactics or the alibis of its presence. This infiltration of the video camera in places where it is the least expected offers an opportunity to question how this moving-image technology modulates information in space: how it exposes the dominant structure of representation and information transmission. Through the work studied in this chapter, I argue that subversive practices of video-making activate spaces with another form of promise: the possibility of a topographical trace, an embodied archive, a local event that can be shared and acknowledged. In these cases, video technology operates as a spatial force and a modulating zone that can transmit information about a situation to transform it into a singular event; one that has the capacity to change the informational trajectory of a society: its rituals, its belief systems, its modes of communication and exchange. The work of Fiona Tan, Nil Yalter, and Zineb Sedira articulates new forms of relation to space and to spatial modes of inhabiting space, more so than “exhibiting” or “representing” something to the spectator. Video activates the site or location more than it produces a specific kind of spectator, and it is this activation as a form of spatial operation that characterizes the subversive potential of performative images. In moving away from a method centred on the viewer experience, 12 See Fred Moten’s trilogy developed around Edouard Glissant’s phrase. I want to thank Kelly Gillespie and Ntone Edjabe for hosting the Fred Moten reading group in 2020 at Chimurenga in Cape Town.

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I hope to account for new modalities of inhabiting space and relating to technology that subverts dominant information about history and geography within the context both of France’s imperial and postcolonial state.

Reverse Scrolling the Imperial Gaze I start here with the work of Indonesian-born Fiona Tan in which I see the work of cultural topography that reveals critical points on how information is circulated and performed by image technology. In the video installation Tuareg, Fiona Tan created a spatial interrogation of colonial practices of representation. Presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1999, Tuareg is composed of two rooms each equipped with one video projector, four speakers, a transparent projection screen, and a 63 min. 45 sec. video presented in a loop. Tan’s audio-visual installation is made of two rooms each broadcasting a different sound and separated by a two-sided screen window. For this video installation, Fiona Tan uses an ethnographic film. Ethnographic film is a discursive category broadly defined by Griffiths as the “looking relations between the initiator of the gaze and the recipient.”13 The video shows scenes of Tuareg children, members of the Berber people, in the Western regions of Central Sahara and the Sahel. Made of early documentary film footage from 1930, Tuareg engages the hierarchical encounters between colonial Europeans, armed with cameras, and native children. The same digitally transferred ethnographic footage is displayed in two rooms, except that in one of the rooms the video is shown in reverse creating a sense of estrangement in the viewer who is only aware of such difference by going back and forth between the different rooms. The thirty-second-looped video shows a photograph for the first seven seconds. Then, without any cut, the image animates and reveals itself as a filmic image where the children are seen playing, laughing, and enjoying themselves. Twenty-seven seconds later, the photographic order is re-installed, the children are seen posing again, and the liveliness and joyfulness shown in the film disappears. With this archival footage, Tan continued her engagement with representational modes of documenting life to address the ambivalent power at play in the observed/observer relation.14 Tan places an image that belongs neither to photography nor to cinema at the centre of her installation. Louise Hornby emphasizes the fact that the artist exploits the thirty-second ethnographic footage precisely because it 13 Griffiths 2002, p. xxix. 14 Parfait in Assche 2006, p. 265.

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shows a “technological misrecognition.”15 The children are pausing in front of the camera as if they were posing for a photographer. The film reveals the various sequences of interaction among the children while they try to perform an “authentic pose” for the camera crew. By doing so, Tan chooses to expose what the ethnographic image often rejects, namely, the in-between moments of raw life. In the case of ethnographic films, these in-between moments reveal the “subjective complexities of the people shown, including their awareness of the act of their inscription.”16 The film reveals the staging of the children as Other—a category positioned to perform a certain authenticity for the camera—as well as the Othering effect of the camera on them—a process of subjectification where the camera negotiates and frames the “staged authenticity” of its subject.17 The early documentary film footage shown in Tuareg commemorates the subtle events and “private moments of everyday life,”18 a theme central to Tan’s work. The installation presents both the déroulement (unfolding) of the moving image and two modes of défilement (scrolling): one that follows the temporal order captured by the “imperial gaze,”19 and one that un-rules the order of time of the ethnographic film by showing it in reverse. In dividing the video installation in two rooms where two temporal orders are at play, Tan modulates the information between temporalities to further highlight modes of seeing and being seen inscribed in filmic and photographic technology. Her video installation offers a zone of modulation where the cultural topography of French empire can be seen at work. As Françoise Parfait highlights, “the playfulness (désordre) of childhood contrasts with the order of colonial law, where the disorder of the real contradicts the order of representation, and where the disorder of fantasized Africa clashes with Western reason.”20 The order of colonial law is both a technology of information and a ruling system of image inscription. For Tan, images are at the centre of sociological inquiries, and video operates as a tool to interrogate the work images perform for the viewer. Tuareg questions the nature of the image: l’image prise (image taken) by the photographic object and l’image saisie (image seized) by the camera as a colonial tool. By image prise, I refer to the image taken by the technical object of the camera that captures and inscribes the image as photographic 15 16 17 18 19 20

Hornby 2010, p. 58. Griffiths 2002, p. xix. MacCannell 1976, pp. 91–107 cited in Griffiths 2002, p. 52. Gane 2017, p. 21. See Kaplan 1997. Parfait, https://fionatan.nl/project/tuareg/.

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artefact that can be reproduced, disseminated, and has a potential for falsification.21 An image prise is a technical image that is produced by an apparatus designed to create programmed information and enforce values.22 However, in the case of Tan’s installation, the technical image does not operate according to “inverted vectors of meaning.”23 The meaning of the image prise is neither found in what the image represents or projects. The meaning is found in what the image rejects: the reality of the subjects, the liveliness of the children, and the time in-between free from the colonial order of the camera. The image prise is one that reveals the emprise (the grip) that the colonial camera has on its subjects. It is an image that models information about a subject and programmes the effects the image has on the viewer. As such, the image prise is always an image inclined to have an emprise—a grip—that gets attached to the representation in order to command signification. This image prise as an emprise transforms the subject into a disposable entity that does not have the agency to communicate and transmit information on its own terms, and that sees representation of him or herself shaping the landscape of his or her modes of being. By reversing the défilement (scrolling) of the video in one of the two rooms, Tan’s installation shows another dimension to the image: its capacity to be both a capture and an assignation. The image saisie is the extraction of an image from the liveliness of an individual. The image seizes a discrete instant from a living process and ascribes that instant as assignation. While the image prise is about the rejection of reality in favour of a modelled image of the real, the image saisie is the capture of a moment and the assignation of that moment as the identifying vector of signification. The image saisie is more than a visual synecdoche: a form of utterance where a discrete part refers to the whole of something. L’image saisie functions to extract information from the individual and in return it imposes this information as an assignation, a signifying marker that becomes an identifier. While the image prise functions as an emprise (a grip), the image saisie functions as an assignation that hides the singularity of the individual or collective being that the image replaces. At stake in these two subjectifying structures—image prise and image saisie—is the violent removal of singularity: the myriad of alternative realities left unwanted by the master of the camera whose work coincides with both the colonial imaginary and agenda of empire.24 21 22 23 24

Stiegler 2007, p. 151. Flusser 1986, p. 328. Flusser 2011, p. 50. Hartmann, Silvester, and Hayes 1999, p. 5.

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Tuareg oscillates between image prise and an image saisie to better reverse the imperial gaze: a gaze that, according to Kaplan, has to do with the imperialization of western spectators’ eyes.25 While the gaze is often understood as contributing to the subject’s interpellation, Kaplan focuses on a different form of destabilization that disrupts the apparently fixed subjectivities of the dominant order. This destabilization operates in Tan’s installation according to a double mediation: first a mediation performed by the camera that captures the children’s gaze, joy, and movement; and second, a decision to reverse the temporality of the ethnographic film. The children are staring at the camera when they pose for the crew, yet the viewer watching the video within the museum is staring at another kind of gaze that destabilizes white subjectivities.26 These subjectivities are understood, according to Kaplan, as ones that are not traditionally exposed to the subversive gaze of the Other.27 I see in Tan’s apparatus a way of questioning a zone of modulation where the gaze of the viewer is unruled by the gaze of the subjects observed, creating a subversive potential that participates in what Sandoval calls a “topography of consciousness in opposition.” Tan’s installation calls into question two positionalities: the one assigned to ethnographic subjects required to perform for the photographer, and the white subjectivities present in the filmic sequence and now presented to the viewer of the installation. Between the image prise and the image saisie lies a “predatory excess” performing for the viewers of the installation.28 I understand this predatory excess, a term I borrow from Stéphane Carrayrou, as the moment when the repressed content of the colonial order is revealed to the viewers via subjects performing something other than the colonial categories of being assigned to them. Tan’s video installation performs an un-ruling that modulates information, creating a subversive force to reverse the imperial order of France’s colonial history of image technology. Presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1999, a place where one could easily speculate that most of the visitors were white Europeans, Tan chose a documentary film from the 1930s, a time where France hosted the international colonial exhibition of Vincennes (a city neighbouring Paris) in 1931. A deconstructive politics of image making and image viewing is performed together in the installation, functioning as a double critique of 25 Kaplan 1997, p. 219. 26 Ibid., p. xix. 27 Ibid. 28 Carrayrou 2004, p. 128.

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visual inscription. Tan makes the visitor of the Centre Pompidou undo the norms of filmic viewing by going back and forth between the rooms inscribing the gaze in the making of a photographic-like ethnographic film and unregistering the gaze in the reverse scrolling of the film in the second room. The two positionalities of the image prise and the image saisie further destabilize the white subjectivities of the visitors because the installation requires them to move from one room to the other in order to effectively grasp the reverse scroll at play in the installation. Only through this spatial negotiation is the viewer able to see the photographed subjects both as subjects positioned for the camera and as non-static beings shot within the unfolding movement of the film. The active presence of the children’s gaze comes to be an intermittent central focus, one that punctuates the video while giving access to the techno-imperial relationship that gives shape to the ethnographic image. Tan’s installation modulates the quality of the view, the work of the gaze, and the presence of the viewer to inscribe a certain reflexivity in the space of the museum. The use of the reverse scrolling as an un-ruling of the ethnographic footage becomes a means to reflect on the making of racial and cultural difference, a difference highly influenced by the technology of visual inscriptions. Tan’s use of archival material encourages us to ponder on the legacies of colonialism and the responsibility of the viewer in producing knowledge about/out of others. Tuareg offers a modulation that has to do with the imaginary structure of othering central to the European colonial project. Tan not only takes the object of the ethnographic archive out of its context by placing it in a museum of modern art, but also reverses the flow of this temporal object to anchor a different rapport between phenomenology and ontology. The installation modulates the spatial condition of image viewing, the technical condition of image capture, and the symbolic disposition of the Western Imperial context to construct itself in the gaze of the Other. By showing the in-between of images, namely the part that reveals the life of the children outside the framework of their controlled positionality, Tan offers a glimpse of biography that exceeds the establishment of the imperial frame of visibility. Furthermore, Tan shows a footage shaped by an exception: a moment where the camera captures more than what the camera crew intended to take from their subject. Such an exception, highlighted by the reversed scrolling of the film, is comprehended as a transformative way to access past events and to make sense of a temporality that exceeds the frame of the filmstrip to embody a presence in the setting of the museum. The digitization of the filmic footage onto video reframes the archivization of such a documentary ethnographic object, adding a critical layer of reflexivity

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to the culture of the gaze and the comprehensive understanding of otherness in the museum. This layer of reflexivity is embodied in Tan’s decision to mechanically reverse the temporal scrolling of the filmic image, registering a different possibility for encountering the subjects displayed on screen. Tuareg not only reflects upon the encounter between the filmic and the photographic, but also offers a modality to think about the machinic as a system that remains open to contestation and experimentation, revealing the power of image technologies “to reverse scroll” practices structured through power dynamics, as seen in the early documentary ethnographic film. Tuareg offers a modality for thinking about the relation between photography (the instant time-space captured in one frame), cinema (the moving-image world taken as staged liveliness), and video technology (the modulating space where the inscription of the imperial gaze can be addressed and reversed). Tan’s video installation contributes to developing the uncertain relation between movement and immobility; a relation that is today “the chief attribute of a metamorphosis of the image.”29 Yet, the installation moves away from the documentary style of ethnographic exploration to become a commentary on the making of the imperial gaze, revealing what photography hides: the déroulement of the scene and the making of the observed subject. This making of the subject into an observable other operates according to a specific transfer where the déroulement (unfolding) of life is transferred into the défilement (scrolling) of the filmic sequence. Yet, the spatiality of the video images is not equally presented as the video installation shows a reversed scrolling of the filmic image, allowing access not only to the in-between of the image, its déroulement, but to the erosion of the gaze in défilement. By putting the viewer in a situation where they have to negotiate two different orders of time and space (a scrolling and a reverse scrolling of the moving image), Tan’s installation dislocates the position of the museum viewer into two distinct directions. One direction is traced by the camera crew dictating the pose to the children while manipulating the device as if they were photographers; the other direction is the movement of the viewer forced to go back and forth in between the rooms to slowly make sense of the movement at play in the looped video. The installation offers a dislocation of the projective structure at play in ethnographic documentary films: the viewer faces the gaze of the children, yet the children’s gaze is installed in a reversal of viewpoint that challenges the code of ordering and othering the subject in the image. 29 Bellour 1989, p.107.

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The spatial apparatus in Tuareg’s video installation dislocates the possibility of positioning the children as “native informants”; a concept developed by Gayatri Spivak in 1999, the same year Tuareg was shown in Paris.30 The native informant, “literally the person who feeds anthropology,”31 exposes the normativity of the determinant reference that is the framework of intelligibility imposed by the North to shape the possibility of reflexive judgement.32 For Spivak, “geo-graphy” means “writing the world”33: the inscription of the trace onto a spacing of significative forms. The figure of the native-informant, especially the “native-informant-as-woman-of-the-South,” is a figure created by way of the colonial/postcolonial paradigm, which Spivak locates in the long itinerary: native informant / colonial subject / postcolonial subject / globalized subject.34 Spivak suggests that the subject-position of the native informant is both historically and geopolitically inscribed35 and calls for “an alternative geography of the ‘worlding’ of today’s global South.”36 Central to Spivak’s concept of native informant is the notion of information, both the transmission of a coded message that responds to a certain framework of intelligibility and the shaping of a form that can be detected, used, and reproduced. The structure of intelligibility and operation of representation shape what Spivak calls the “telematic postmodern culture of information command.”37 This telematic postmodern culture relies on prosthetic arguments that value models of retention and archival hierarchization even though their hegemonic writing of the world gives shape to a geography of empires (patriarchal, colonial) that exhausts the very resources they rely upon. In this sense, Spivak foregrounds a critique of information societies that use technology as alibi for the implementation of new forms of governance and control.38 The extraction and retention of the knowledge resources is replaced by hegemonic 30 I acknowledge that Leo Braudy’s 1991 book Native Informant: Essays on Film, Fiction and Popular Culture was written before Spivak’s. Yet, for this study on the subversive dimension of video images within the context of information technology, I build on Spivak’s notion of native informant as developed in her 1999 A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. 31 Spivak 1999, p. 142 32 Ibid., p. 6. 33 Ibid., p. 30. 34 Ibid., p. 223. 35 Ibid., p. 344. 36 Ibid., p. 200. 37 Ibid., p. 392. 38 Nony 2019, p. 742.

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platforms of information that operate as new organizational modes of exploitation.39 For Spivak, the electrif ication of life has given shape to a major challenge: “To repeat, neither the colonial, nor the postcolonial subject inhabits the (im)possible perspective of the native informant or the implied contemporary receiver.”40 The system that relies on the native informant replaces subjectivities and their non-reducible values by ready-made information, as seen in the 1931 colonial exhibition of Vincennes where people were put on display to inform and comfort the imperial gaze of western spectators. Spivak’s critique is one concerned with the systemic extraction and reproduction of information to sustain the hegemony of the colonial empire, one that leads the author to argue that “Electronif ication of biodiversity is colonialism’s newest trick.”41 In the context of video technology, such an electronification of biodiversity has led to the planetary computerization of the living now modelled to perform and inform the “oppressive mass-mediatic modernity”42 we live in. This oppressive society of information is sustained by a platform of computation and a sovereign system of codes that influence our notions of democracy, history, and the body. In order to un-rule the nativeinformant system that methodically deterritorializes subjectivities to direct the informational trajectory of society, individuals need to equip themselves with collective apparatuses of processual potentialities that can re-pattern, re-affect, and overcode the existential territories central to the nurturing of subjectivities. 43 The critique of the native informant, grounded in the necessity of a new cartography of knowledge transmission, is in dialogue with the effort to un-rule the totalitarian totalization of consciousness imposed by mass media. 44

Differential Modes of Performing Technology What technological and theoretical paradigm is appropriate and helpful in understanding the subversive dimension of video images? I have found that theories of performativity in fact underscore the very problem imposed by mass media apparatuses of representation. By performativity, and building 39 40 41 42 43 44

Chakravartty and Ferreira da Silva 2012, pp. 361–85. Spivak 1999, p. 62. Ibid., p. 391. Guattari 2012, p. 6. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 26.

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on the work of art historian Jane Blocker, 45 I mean to call attention to the aesthetic force and theoretical potential of the video work; its power to defy and un-rule hegemonic patterns of representation. In what follows, I continue my investigation into the zones of modulation created by video technology to engage other narratives around the body and its signifying presence in postcolonial France. I look at Turkish born multi-medium artist Nil Yalter’s work to understand how she replaces the geo-graphy of the native informant with her own video-graphy, claiming command over the narratives that can be inscribed on her body in her 24 min. black and white video La Femme sans tête ou La Danse du ventre (The Headless Woman or The Belly Dance). La Femme sans tête ou La Danse du ventre from 1974 is Yalter’s first video work and marks her engagement with a socio-critical46 and ethno-critical dimension of art.47 Invited by Dany Bloch with two other artists (Dominique Belloir and Robert Cahen), Nil Yalter was given video equipment and was asked to do something with it in two days. The piece was for the Centre national des arts visuels’ (National Centre for Visual Arts) first major exhibition on video art titled “Art, vidéo, confrontation.”48 Yalter had the Sony portapak camera and wanted to perform a belly dance that would focus on women’s sexuality, and the clitoris in particular. At that time, Yalter had read René Nelli’s book Érotique et civilisations and was in conversation with ethnologist Bernard Dupaigne who told Yalter about a ritual where disobedient women were veiled and presented to a prête musulman (“Muslim priest” in the text) who would write verses from the Quran on their belly.49 Yalter explained in an interview that from time to time, the story goes, the priest makes a mistake and licks the belly to correct the error in front of the husband, so the woman becomes both obedient and fertile.50 Yalter wanted to use the ritual of the belly to write her own understanding of women’s sexuality.51 In the video performance, Yalter weaves together belly dance and words handwritten on her skin. The video starts with a blur. We hear Yalter’s voice reading out the sentence: La femme véritable est à la fois “convexe” et “concave” (“The real woman is both ‘convex’ and ‘concave’”). Slowly, the image reveals her 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Blocker 1999, p. 7. Dumont 2019. Gaudibert 1987, p. 4. Yalter in Yalter and Dumont 2019, p. 36. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., pp. 36–37. Dumont 2016, p. 6.

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belly. In the frame, we can see her skirt, which has handwritten inscriptions on it. In this sequence, she writes the sentence she previously read out in capital letters around her belly button. The letters take the shape of a round poem where the belly button lies at the centre. Yalter starts reading out a text that she writes on her belly from top to bottom, starting on the left flank. She spells the words once, then writes the sentence and repeats the entire sentence a second time. The words are written from top to bottom, left to right. As a viewer, you don’t see her face. You only see the writing being inscribed and the text appearing from right to left on the screen. At the end of the sequence, capital letters are covering the entirety of her belly. The text reads as follows: But they must not be deprived morally or physically of the main centre of its convexity, the clitoris. This hatred of the clitoris corresponds in truth to the ancestral horror that men have always felt for the virile and natural component of women, the one which in them conditions absolute orgasm. He did everything he could to prevent this orgasm by mutilating her physically or morally. It is therefore not surprising that as she got rid of the shame of having a clitoris and the sin of pleasure, the woman recovered at the same time as her balance, the balance of the two polarities, all the resources of this sexuality both convex and concave.

When the performer is done writing and her belly is covered with her handwritten words, she starts dancing, slowly moving her hips to the rhythm of a belly dance. The music intensifies in the background while the central sentence The real woman is both “convex” and “concave” moves around her belly button. Her moves accelerate, punctuating the movement of her hips, offering a layer of sensuality to the words previously spoken and written. Her belly is dancing in the frame, giving a sensual support to the text and the meaning of the words. To the screen as a surface of inscription, a writing with light, is juxtaposed Yalter’s moving body that is shaped by the words and the gestures of a dance. Here Yalter’s body becomes a surface where another temporality of writing is inscribed in the flesh. Her video modulates a zone of uncertainty that oscillates between body, music, and textuality. The sensuality of her belly performs a kind of seduction on the viewer who is engaged in the act of viewing, enmeshed in a zone of modulation that performs a different kind of narrative about women’s sexuality. The video ends by gradually zooming in to focus on her belly button. The movement of the dance makes it increasingly difficult to see the written words. Only her movements are depicted while a visual blur fills up the

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frame. The words are indistinct. We hear a song; a woman is singing; we hear hands clapping. We see most of her hips and we see what looks like a skirt dancing in the frame. The dance slows down, and the camera zooms out to focus on the belly button; the letters are perceptible again. The music stops. Slowly, the dancer turns to show her back. She is holding her arms behind her back. The title of the video “La femme sans tête ou la danse du ventre” as well as her name “Nil Yalter” are written on her left hand. The video stops on this signature. The belly moves, dislocates the scribe, blurs the lines, and transforms the flesh into a liminal space where signification requires a visual mise au point (focus). Such a focus is not a mise en scène (a staging that, as seen in the documentary footage used in Touareg, transforms the native into a figure for the production of information) but a mise au point (a setting that sets the parameters for other modalities of vision and knowledge production to emerge). Yalter’s La Femme sans tête ou La Danse du ventre offers a subject capable of beauty performed according to its own rhythm: a subject performing a transformative resistance. Yalter’s video is a technology that undoes “the logic of hegemonic feminism” that Sandoval defines as being organized around a common code to reproduce exclusionary forms of knowledge.52 By writing on her skin, front to bottom, the words appear on the screen as if she were writing from right to left, adapting to the curve of her body that becomes the sculptural paper upon which to inscribe her text. Yalter’s belly becomes a site, activated by the videotape, where her opposition to the hegemonic understanding of women’s sexuality is performed. By using her own body, Yalter offers an alternative grid of intelligibility and refuses to be set in a ready-to-be-read position, a motivation that is reinforced by her belly dance moves at the end of the video. Yalter makes visible “a differential mode of consciousness-in-resistance:”53 she defies the apparatus of intelligibility by grounding an emancipatory practice of love and sexual pleasure. Defined by Sandoval as a “technology for social transformation,”54 this emancipatory practice of love creates a new cartography: a performative tool for differential consciousness that resembles the fight against oppressive forms of intelligibility: Differential consciousness represents a strategy of oppositional ideology that functions on an altogether different register. Its powers can be 52 Sandoval 2000, pp. 46–47. 53 Ibid., p. 55. 54 Ibid., p. 3.

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thought of as mobile—not nomadic, but rather cinematographic: a kinetic motion that manoeuvres, poetically transfigures, and orchestrates while demanding alienation, perversion, and reformation in both spectators and practitioners.55

Yalter writes her body from the liminal and performative realm of the differential:56 a realm made of “a movement that keeps all aspects of being in motion and mutation.”57 Because Yalter’s belly is covered by a text whose words signify the necessity of freeing the organ of pleasure, namely the clitoris, from men’s hatred, her body appears as differential. Her body is no longer subjugated to the dominant gaze that dictates the dynamics of visibility. She fully owns the script and the material support where textuality and sexuality are inscribed. In Sandoval’s words: Yalter’s video functions as a “differential intervention […] capable of transforming the politics of power.”58 She undoes the process of minorization that inscribes difference and uses the power of the performative to resist a homogenous and imperial reading of herself. In La Femme sans tête ou La Danse du ventre, Yalter uses video as a way of writing her own autobiography with the gaze: video-graphy becomes the inscription of the act of seeing as a modality for signification. Video means “I see” and suggests that the central operation of this technology of visual and sonic inscription is the way in which the gaze itself becomes the tool for inscribing signification. While film meant the membrane (the film-strip) video designates the action of seeing in the first person: the eye and the “I,” as suggested by Bellour.59 Video, as an “I see” form of art, is concerned with the possibility of modulating modes of apprehending and making sense of the real. Central to video-graphy is the writing of the gaze and the location where such a work is seen. Here, seeing is the perceptive modality that inscribes a graph in the eye of the viewer. Yalter’s video shows that the subject can be phenomenologically and perceptively embodied in an audio-visual experience that modulates the very contours of such an inscription. In that context, grounding video art and video activism (both as image and apparatus) as a space-critical medium allows for thinking together the places video inhabits and the ones it creates. Here the body 55 Ibid., p. 44. 56 Ibid., p. 58. 57 Ibid., p. 129. 58 Ibid. 59 See Bellour 1989.

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of the performer is turned into a writer who takes her belly as the fleshy supplement to inscribe both the letter and the gaze. In La Femme sans tête ou La Danse du ventre the perspective of the native informant is not only put on display, it becomes the support for a certain writing of the body in the gaze of the viewer. While in Spivak, the native informant is one “affected as a centrally interpellated voice from the margin,”60 Yalter’s video modulates the spatial and vocal encounter to produce data on her own terms: through her voice, her body, her dancing, and her writing. The perspective of the artist guides the making of this video autobiography. The native informant is no longer a subject without autobiography: “a figure, who, in ethnography, can only provide data, to be interpreted by the knowing subject for reading.”61 On the contrary, the figure in Yalter’s videotape is one that is writing itself out of this “denial of access to autobiography,”62 refusing to fit the epistemic constraints of an a priori model of intelligibility. Animated by the struggles against domination, Yalter was involved in the feminist milieus that were emerging in France at the time. As Florence Dumont highlights, Yalter joined both Femmes/ Art (1975–1977) and Femmes en Lutte (1976–1980), two groups that worked for the recognition of woman in what was a very sexist space at the time.63 Thirty years after her first videotape, Yalter continued her socio-critical engagement with video as a subversive image technology. In Lapidation, a 4 min. 14 sec. colour video from 2009, Yalter denounced the killing of a seventeen-year-old Shiite woman because of her love for a Sunni man. The overarching theme of the video is the public killing of a woman: her suffering, her death but also the vulnerability of her skin, the shape of her curves, and the contrast between the hardness of the rocks and the softness of her flesh. The video starts with the screen split into two images mirroring each other. It shows the interior of an apartment. Nil Yalter is sitting on the floor in front of a closed door, her back toward the camera, 60 Spivak 1999, p. 40. 61 Ibid., p. 49. 62 Ibid., p. 153. 63 “The figures were eloquent: at the time, French art magazines devoted between 0 and 20% of their pages to women artists, while 14 to 20% of artists in the main exhibitions were women. For the contemporary exhibitions of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris the figure was 13.57% and works by women represented 12% of the national collections for that decade (Musée National d’Art Moderne [Centre Pompidou], Fonds National d’Art Contemporain and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris). The indicators of international recognition were even worse. At Douze ans d’art contemporain en France (‘Twelve years of contemporary art in France’), a landmark show put on in 1972 to highlight President Georges Pompidou’s interest in modern art, only four of the 106 artists were women.” Dumont 2019, p. 177.

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a radiator on the left. A square of light is reflected on the wall as if there was an open window that allowed light to trace a rectangular shape on the opposing wall. The video starts with the shadow of Nil Yalter projected on the door. The music is electronic and repetitive. Within a second, we see Nil Yalter taking off her top and sitting topless on the floor, her back facing the camera. She holds a white rock in her hand and uses both hands to place it behind her back, between her scapulae. In addition to the rock she holds in her hands, we see a virtual/animated rock being thrown at her and red letters appear on the screen HELP ME… DON’T LEAVE ME… while her body displays signs of the pain caused by the rock on her flesh. The beauty of her body is rapidly replaced by the pain. Capital letters appear and we read STONING TO DEATH in white on the left and in red on the right of the screen. The screen is still split into two mirror images. The video switches to real images of a lapidation. The footage seems to be taken from a phone and circulated on social media platforms such as YouTube. In the footage, we see a circle of men standing around the body of a woman lying on the floor. The pixelated quality of the image reinforces the voyeuristic dimension of the scene: men are present to kill and be watched doing so. At the centre of the screen, we see a woman receiving the blows caused by the rocks being thrown at her. Her body is bruised. She is bleeding from her skull. Soon, her body stops reacting to the pain. She lies dead in a pool of her own blood. The real images of the killing, namely the sequence from the start of the stoning to death, last thirty seconds. Then the video goes back to the spilt screen format of the beginning and the words LAPIDATIO and TASLAMA appear on the back of the performer, on the left and the right-hand sides of the screen respectively. More virtual/ animated rocks are thrown at Nil Yalter’s back. Her image fades and the image of the real woman being lapidated in public is presented again. This time, the woman is trying to protect her face. We see the rocks on the floor near her body and various figures holding phones to shoot the scene. Back to the apartment: this time the image of Nil Yalter’s back is not replicated as in a mirror but simply as a dual screen showing different sequences. The images are blurry, and more virtual/animated rocks are being thrown at her naked back. Virtual blood appears on her body, at the top of her neck, only in the left side of the screen. These words appear on the screen: STONING TO DEATH. GOLGE KADIN – FEMME OMBRE. We return to the mirroring effect of the screen, and see Yalter using a white sheet and tearing it to cover her body. She disappears into one single image as we see the letters SHADOW WOMEN appear on the sheet. The tearing of the sheet resonates loudly and accentuates the music. Words continue to appear on

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the screen: HAYALET KADIN – GHOST WOMAN. Finally, Lapidation ends at four minuntes and fourteen seconds with images of a burial, of men and women dancing together, and excerpts of news reports. Ostensibly, Lapidation is a story about a woman’s body under attack, marked by violence and male domination. Lapidation tells the moving-image story of women’s bodies under a system of patriarchal rules that harm and kill while the world watches. The presence of the real footage (images of the lapidation performed in the street and images of a news report) is not the only marker that signifies the real. The virtual image performs the same haunting mechanisms that shadow the body of a woman, whose life and death depends on others, marked and bruised by the dominant law of man. The virtual image of the rocks thrown at Nil Yalter activates a site of violence that is both staged and broadcasted to work as an exemplary tomb for women to come. And yet, the magisterial force of Yalter’s work cannot be read as a simple explanation of the real condition of existence under male domination. Lapidation offers what Sandoval coined “a topography of consciousness in opposition”: namely, a cultural topography that seeks to transform oppressive and dominated subjects into resisting and oppositional individuals.64 When Yalter plays with the split screen she refuses to allow you, the viewer, to simply consume one dimension of the story. She confronts you with an almost schizophrenic multiplicity that seizes information and activates the place where the body is being sacrificed. The video becomes a zone of modulation where various modes of bodily presence and image technologies are performed. To say precisely what the body means to Yalter—symbolically, ideologically, historically—is a complex matter. Her pioneering work in video and installation art has created a complex apparatus of intelligibility to interpret what being present and alive means for different people. In Paris, ville lumière (1973–1975), Judy Blum and Nil Yalter travelled through the twenty arrondissements (neighborhoods) of Paris, revealing the stratification of history through objects, symbols, and architecture. In this twelve-metre installation made of drawings, photos, and texts on cloth, Blum and Yalter offer an alternative genealogy of bodily presence and labour force in the city that focuses on places of exclusion and struggle. First presented at the Galerie du Rhinoceros in Paris in 1975, the cloth is hung in the installation room where spectators are invited to read a different approach to the past and its impact on the life experience of contemporary France. Drawings and handwritten texts are used to express more difficult topics than the ones 64 Sandoval 2000, p. 54.

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depicted via photographic format. For the eighteenth arrondissement, Pigalle is written at the top of the banner-like cloth the artists use to rewrite the life experiences of the city’s most secluded and hidden histories. Drawings of sexy underwear are used along with adjectives such as excitante, viril, diabolique, troublante (arousing, virile, diabolic, and troubling). At the bottom of the “Pigalle” section a hand-written text in capital letters reads: DANS LA RUE DE LA GOUTTE D’OR, DES GROUPES D’HOMMES, AGGLUTINES DEVANT LA PORTE OUVERTE D’UN HOTEL OU SE TIENNENT DES FEMMES A MOITIE DESHABILLEES ATTENDENT LEUR TOUR ET CHAQUE FEMME FAIT JUSQU’A CINQUANTE PASSES PAR JOUR, CERTAINES DE CES JEUNES FEMMES SONT DANS UNE ETAT DE GROSSESSE AVANCEE. ALLEZ VOIR ET REFLECHISSEZ.65 Bellow the Pigalle section, there is another section named “La Rue de la Goutte d’Or” where photographs of the inhabitants are put in dialogue with handmade cartographies of metropolitan France and former French colonies such as Senegal, Mali, and Tunisia. At the centre of the map are the geographical contours of metropolitan France, which are surrounded with maps of countries linked to France according to the labour force they provide. Written in English, the bridges that link countries to France read like this: Morocco, clean streets; Algeria, build roads; Dahomey, man on the assembly lines; Senegal, make cars; Mali, build buildings; Chad, remove garbage; Guinea, bury the pipelines; Ivory Coast, dig holes. At the centre of metropolitan France stands the picture of two working men in front of a fabric store. Above the map one can read in English IN FRANCE ABOUT 25 PERCENT OF THE INDUSTRIAL LABOR FORCE ARE FOREIGNERS, THE ACCIDENT RATE FOR MIGRANT WORKERS IS 8 TIMES HIGHER THAN THAT FOR INDIGENOUS WORKERS. The map of the labour force provided by each country is a reminder of France’s reliance on immigrants. Blum and Yalter create a historiography from the margins that relies on the making of space and the critical dimension of mapping and creating cartography as a mode of social critique.66 With humour, and almost in the form of a socio-critical happening, the cloth subversively interpellates its audience: the viewer must engage with an artwork that performs a new grid of intelligibility.67 Knowledge about sex work and the labour force in postcolonial France takes the shape of 65 IN THE STREET OF LA GOUTTE D’OR, GROUPS OF MEN ARE CLUSTERED IN FRONT OF THE OPEN DOOR OF A HOTEL WHERE HALF-UNDRESSED WOMEN ARE WAITING THEIR TURN AND EACH WOMAN MAKES UP TO FIFTY PASSES A DAY, SOME OF THESE YOUNG WOMEN ARE IN AN ADVANCED PREGNANCY. GO SEE AND THINK. 66 Wynter 2006, p. 119. 67 On the notion of the colonial grid of intellegibility, see Albarrán 2020.

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a confrontation: a subversive interpellation that operates to create a new understanding of often overlooked and/or undermined situations. Much like Yalter’s video works modulate embodied understandings of female pleasure and violence, her Paris, ville lumière, co-created with Judy Blum, creates a new cartography of consciousness in opposition to the colonial and patriarchal order of interpretation. For Yalter, art and activism are united to create zones of modulation and subversive frontiers where information about bodily presence and liveness can be presented anew.

Modulating the Markers of Heritage Fiona Tan and Nil Yalter’s work reveal the space-critical dimension of the video medium: not only its capacity for narrative but its aptitude to redirect stories to reveal significant information about history and politics. The space-critical dimension of video technology engages the viewer in its act of viewing, witnessing, and paying attention to reveal differential modes of presence and signification. This last section of the chapter continues to unpack how video modulates visibility to create subversive apparatuses of intelligibility. I engage the work of Zineb Sedira because it uses video technology to question language and identity, and performs a poetics of displacement that engages a form of wandering in space and a mode of wondering in time. The question of displacement is at the core of Sedira’s aesthetic explorations: it stands as a means to question the effects of domination located in a colonial temporality that endures in visual culture.68 Reflecting the sociopolitical mutations of modern societies, the work of this artist born in France, raised in an Algerian culture, and based in London, is anchored in the question of exile and the rich and often troubling experiences colonial diaspora produces. Zineb Sedira’s retrospective at the Jeu de Paume, L’espace d’un instant, ran from October 15, 2019 until January 19, 2020 and spans the years from 1998 to 2020. Interested in diverse media including video, film, installation, and photography, Sedira’s works engage in a reflection on displacement that speaks to the issues of encounters, culture, and the long legacy of colonization. What makes her work so fascinating is that the question of diasporic existence is engaged through the vast geopolitical struggles that produced them in the first place: the global rise of the automobile, as seen in The End of the Road (2010), the systemic exploitation of natural resources 68 Chérel and Dumont 2016, p. 14.

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by the imperial global north in Lighthouse in the Sea of Time (2010) and Transmettre en abyss (2012). Sedira’s engagement with both archival material and documentary-style images enforces her questioning of the wider network of forces and dynamics at stake in the living of displacement and the feeling of diasporic self. Contrary to a poetics that shies away from narration, her work is grounded in the most intimate stories of lineages that in turn speak to wider concerns about the effects of imperialist states on diasporas. The space critical dimension of video technology is poignant in Sedira’s video Monther Tongue from 2002 that is part of a three-screen installation where the artist juxtaposes three generations of woman from her family: Sedira and her mother in Mother Tongue, Sedira and her daughter (who grew up in London) in Daughter and I, and Sedira’s mother and daughter in Grandmother Granddaughter. The voice is central to this installation as each person speaks her respective mother tongue: Sedira talks to her mother in French while her mother speaks Arabic; Sedira talks to her daughter in French and her daughter responds in English; and Sedira’s mother talks to her granddaughter in Arabic; a language that the teenager does not understand. The triptych plays with the various modalities of understanding and being present to one another. The video becomes the ambivalent space in between that which is said, that which is heard, and that which is understood.69 In this video installation, the linguistic message is second to the presence of the family lineage. Sedira was interested in recalling the oral tradition of stories told from mother to daughter that preserved and transmitted cultural identity from one generation to the next. In the case of the installation, this continuity is interrupted by the different languages the three women speak due to exile. The video is not a documentary but an exploration of the diasporic bond that necessitates reinventing the modality of communicating within a family who share various mother tongues. The figures inhabit the space of the video to encounter one another and deploy other modalities of sense-making and bonding. Sedira uses video and photography to stage the story of herself that speaks to the wider concerns of both political, economic, and climate exile. As Ardenne points out, Sedira’s work presents a figure exilaire70 (exile figure) within a conceptual image that is neither abstract nor fictional but traces the contours of her own diasporic journey: both a figurative quest and an intermittent history that is never given as a solution to the complex relation between territory and identity. To Ardenne, Sedira’s work reveals both 69 Sedira 2003, p. 54. 70 Ardenne 2014, p. 10.

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l’impouvoir de l’image71 (the powerlessness of the image) and l’émouvoir de l’image (the moving/emotional dimension of the image). The powerlessness of the image is one that resides in the displacement exile imposes upon the individual. The moving/emotional dimension of the image is shown in subtle gestures, exchanges of gaze and smile, revealing the perseverance of communication outside of linguistic realms. In both cases, the image portrays the body that becomes un outil performatif (a performative tool): an instrument to know oneself and to build one’s home in the world.72 Often thought together, coloniality and diaspora give shape to a twoheaded monster: one that endlessly capitalize on the forced removal of the people and their denial by colonial powers of their claim to their own land. In this context, the notion of migritude (which merges together négritude and migration) was coined by Jacques Chevrier to symbolise a space where artists in diasporas can disengage with both the culture of their homeland and the culture of their new country to create a new hybrid space that speaks to their changing identity.73 I remain unconvinced by this definition because it is predicated on notions of erasure. To whose homeland and culture are we referring here? Is the problem that the artists in diaspora could not produce their identity outside of a disengagement with their past selves? The work of Zineb Sedira complicates this notion of migritude. She does not disengage but performatively redefines what culture means in nomadic terms74 through a poetics of displacement within and beyond physical borders. To quote Christine Van Assch, Sedira’s earlier work, as seen in Mother Tongue, engages the viewer and makes them receptive to “historical information communicated via biographical mise-en-scène.”75 Here the space-critical dimension of video technology creates a zone where information, language, and signification can be assembled to create a new horizon of signification. Another modality of performing the image exists in the fact that the three artists discussed in this chapter use video to undo the dominant culture. Déroulement (unfolding), défilement (scrolling), and déréglement (un-ruling) are used as spatial categories and offer modulations that claim other ways of inhabiting history, geography, and the body. Déroulement, défilement, and déréglement address the operative supports (and often 71 72 73 74 75

Ibid. p. 11. Sedira 2003, p. 54. Chevrier, cited by Dumont 2016, p. 77. Pisters 2011, p. 180. Van Assche in Sedira 2006, p. 61.

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technical supplements) that shape the modalities of singular and local processes of individuation that take place via video technology. These modulations call for an awareness of the energetic field at stake in a spatial installation where forms of collective inhabitancy can be created anew. In this chapter, I tackled the performative dimension of video images from the point of view of the spatial modulations they produce. This chapter interrogated the zone of modulation that different video works create. The zone of modulation means that specific operations are produced to uncover modalities of occupying space. The powerful force of video as an image and an apparatus resides in its capacity to spatially engage diverse modalities of inhabitancy.

Conclusion This chapter questioned the zones of modulation that perform within our environment through an exploration of video art and video activism in post-independence France. Central to video technology is place, location, and territory. More often than not, mediated spaces (malls, airports, subways) are spaces where bodies are in transit, meaning that the place only stands as a transitory destination. The movement of bodies in trains, subways, buses, and shopping malls is movement guided by different tensions.76 “The hypermediacy of nonplaces”77 is a central characteristic of places of passage. The transit of bodies and the passage of images seem to function in juxtaposition to one another, increasing a sense of speed and movement in an already fast-moving world. I am interested in the relationship between the media object of the electronic video image and how bodies inhabit space. I tackled the performative dimension of video imagery through the angle of space to address how performative images reconfigure orientations and subject positions. By zones of modulation, I referred to spatio-temporal areas activated by video technologies. Taking video technology as producing zones of modulation is a way of grounding the medium in a space-critical approach, to address the psychic and social modes of inhabiting our media-driven environment. This space-critical approach to video technology reveals the dynamics at stake in our media-driven environment and how video objects may activate spaces and reveal forms of inhabitancy. Video is more than mediation and communication. It operates in the real space of audio-visual 76 See Augé 1995. 77 Bolter and Grusin 1999, p. 175.

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experience to reveal other modes of inscribing a perceptive layer that informs and gives shape to subversive modes of existence. I am interested in how specific places invite an interrogation of mediation and look at the spatial modulations that video objects can produce to reinvent subversive modes of inhabitancy as well as cohabitation with technology. Might these modes be the reverse scrolling of an image, the writing of the body in the gaze of the viewer, or the wandering of spaces between several mother tongues? The chapter argues that video technology structures our modes of inhabiting space because it shapes how one receives and transmits information about an event. The transmission of the event via video technology shapes the significative force of such an event; a force that is often reduced to a specific zone of mediation when the performative images circulate according to mass media platforms of communication.

Works Cited Albarrán, Raquel. “Material encounters: Columbus’s Diario del primer viaje and the objects of colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies.” In The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492–1898), edited by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias, 249–66. London: Routledge, 2020. Albu, Cristina. Mirror Effect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Aliaga, Juan Vicente. “Center of Gravity: Feminism and Gender Perspective in Nil Yalter’s Work from the 1970s and 80s.” In Nil Yalter, edited by Derya Yücel, 134–81. Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2013. Ardenne, Paul. Zineb Sedira. Nice: Les Éditions DEL’ART, 2014. Assche, Christine Van, ed. Nouveau Médias Installation. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2006. Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Beller, Jonathan. The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018. Bellour, Raymond. Between the Images. Translated by Allyn Hardyck. Geneva: JRP Editions, 2012. Bellour, Raymond. Eye for I: Video Self-Portraits. New York: Independent Curators, 1989. Bishop, Claire. Art Installation. London: Tate Publishing, 2005. Blocker, Jane. Becoming Past: History in Contemporary Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

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Blocker, Jane. Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Braudy, Leo. Native Informant: Essays on Film, Fiction and Popular Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Carrayrou, Stéphane. “Multiple Approaches to the Idea Put Forward by Fiona Tan: Seeing Is Creating.” In Zineb Sedira, edited by Paul Ardenne, 3–21. Nice: Les Éditions DEL’ART, 2004. Chakravartty, Paula, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalim – An Introduction.”American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (September 2012.): 361–85. Chérel, Emmanuelle, and Fabienne Dupont, eds. L’histoire n’est pas donnée: Art contemporain et postcolonialité en France. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016. Chevrier, Jacques. “Afrique(s)-sur-Seine: autour de la notion de ‘migritude.”’ Notre Librairie, no. 155–56 (juillet-décembre 2004): 96–100. Couchot, Edmond “La mosaïque ordonnée ou l’écran saisi par le calcul.” Communications 48 (1988): 79–87. https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1988.1721. Deutsche, Rosalyn. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Dillet, Benoît, and Tara Puri. The Political Space of Art. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016. Dumont, Fabienne. “La Cosmogonie de Nil Yalter.” In Nil Yalter, 5–34. Metz: Frac Lorraine, 2016. Dumont, Fabienne. Nil Yalter: A la confluences des mémoires migrantes, féministes, ouvrières et des mythologies. Vitry-sur-Seine: MAC VAL, 2019. Dumont, Fabienne. “Penser une ‘migritude’ genrée et l’hybridation culturelle dans une perspective coloniale: Les exemples de Nil Yalter et Zineb Sedira.” In L’Histoire n’est pas donnée: Art contemporain et postcolonialité en France, edited by Emmanuelle Chérel and Fabienne Dumont, 77–88. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016. Enwezor, Okwui, and Mélanie Bouteloup, eds. Intense proximité: Un anthologie du proche et du lointain. Paris: Palais de Tokyo, 2012. Etelain, Jeanne. “Qu’appelle-t-on zone? A la recherche d’un concept manqué?” Les Temps modernes 692 (2017): 113–35. https://zonezadir.hypotheses.org/ files/2019/01/Temps_Modernes_692-Jeanne_ETELAIN-1.pdf. Farocki, Harun. “Phantom Images.” Translated by Brian Poole. Public 29 (2004): 12–22. https://public.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/public/article/view/30354/27882. Flusser, Vilém. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

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Flusser, Vilém. “The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object: An Essay on the Ontological Standing of Photographs.” Leonardo 19, no. 4 (1986): 329–32. Gaudibert, Pierre. “Nil Yalter, artiste ethnocritique.” +-O revue d’art contemporain, no. 47 (1987): 4–7. Gane, Eva Klerck. “The Remembrance of Geography.” Translated by Peter Cripps. In Fiona Tan, edited and foreword by Sabrina van der Ley, Enrico Lunghi, Susanne Gaensheimer, Suzanne Landau, 15–30. London: Koenig Books, 2017. Griffiths, Alison. Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology & Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Guattari, Félix. Schizoanalytics Cartographies. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Hartmann, Wolfram, Silvester, Jeremy, and Patricia Hayes. The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History. Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1999. Hornby, Louise. “Stillness and the Anticinematic in the Work of Fiona Tan.” Grey Room 41 (Fall 2010): 48–71. https://doi.org/10.1162/GREY_a_00008. Jameson, Frederic. Potsmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Jecu, Marta. “The Return as a Work of the Mind: Considerations on Zineb Sedira’s Exhibition at the Jeu de Paume.” In A Brief Moment. L’espace d’un instant: Zineb Sedira, edited Marta Jecu, Gilane Tawadros, José Miguel G. Cortès, and Pia Viewing, 37–40. Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2019. Kaplan, E. Ann. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze. New York: Routledge, 1997. Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. Leclerq, Sophie. “Une histoire surréaliste de la colonialité.” In L’Histoire n’est pas donnée: Art contemporain et postcolonialité en France, edited by Emmanuelle Chérel and Fabienne Dumont, 37–48. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken, 1976. McTighe, Monica E. Framed Spaces: Photography and Memory in Contemporary Installation Art. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2012. Nelli, René. Érotique et civilisations. Paris: Weber, 1972. Nony, Anaïs. “Technology of Neo-Colonial Epistemes.” Philosophy Today 63, no. 3 (Summer 2019): 731–44. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday20191111292. Parfait, Françoise. Vidéo: Un Art Contemporain. Paris: Éditions du Regard, 2001. Pisters, Patricia. “The Mosaic Film: Nomadic Style and Politics in Transnational Media Culture.” In Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture: Conflict, Resistance,

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and Agency, edited by Mike Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro, 175–94. New York: Editions Rodopi B. V, 2011. Reiss, Julie H. From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Rebentisch, Juliane. Aesthetics of Installation Art. Translated by Daniel Hendrickson with Gerrit Jackson. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2003. Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Sedira, Zineb. “Zineb Sedira entretien avec Larys Frogie.” In Ouvertures algériennes, créations vivantes, 53–55. Rennes: Éditions La Criée centre d’art contemporain, 2003. Sedira, Zineb. Zineb Sedira: Gardiennes d’images. Paris: SAM Art Projects, 2010. Sedira, Zineb. “Zineb Sedira in Conversation with Christine Van Assche.” In Saphir, 56–63. London: The Photographer’s Gallery and Paris: Kamel Mennour, Paris Musees, 2006. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Simondon, Gilbert. Du Mode d’Existence des Objets Techniques. Paris: Aubier, 2012. Simondon, Gilbert. L’individuation psychique et collective à la lumière des notions de Forme, Information, Potentiel et Métastabilité. Paris: Aubier, 1989. Stiegler, Bernard. Dans la disruption: Comment ne pas devenir fou? Paris: Actes Sud, 2018. Stiegler, Bernard. La Technique et le temps 2: La désorientation. Paris: Galilée, 1996. Stiegler, Bernard, and Jacques Derrida. Ecographies of Television. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Suderburg, Erika, ed. Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Wynter, Sylvia. “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre.” In Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, edited by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, 107–69. London: Paradigm Publisher, 2006. Yalter, Nil, and Fabienne Dumont. Nil Yalter: Entretien avec Fabienne Dumont. Paris: Manuella Éditions, 2019. Zamoum, Fatma Zohra. ‘Palabres autour du voile.’ In Ouvertures algériennes, créations vivantes, 48–53. Rennes: La Criée centre d’art contemporain, 2003.

3.

Programmed Life and Racialized Technesis Abstract: In chapter 3, I revaluate the models of interpellation (Fanon, Althusser) from the point of view of Big Data ideology (Rouvroy) to consider the implementation of programmed life and “premature death” (Gilmore) in today’s digital society. The chapter engages debates in surveillance studies and questions the making of racialized bodies by telling the story of Thierry Kuntzel’s work of art Hiver, la mort de Robert Walser presented at the MoMA in 1991, which focuses on the themes of terror, death, eroticism, and sexuality. In this chapter, I engage the pre-emptive models of data extraction to question the racialized technology of societies of incarceration and control. Kuntzel’s piece usefully addresses the subjects of history that are written upon by technology and the wider consequences of technologically driven narratives of survival and resistance. I argue that race in relation to video technology is a problem of discerning the cause from the conditions of implementation of racist politics in societies. Keywords: racism, surveillance, technology, video, Thierry Kuntzel

Tools, in this way, capture more than just people’s bodies. They also capture the imagination, offering technological fixes for a wide range of social problems. – Ruha Benjamin 1 Let us try not to miss the target here: choosing which technological evolution we wish to emerge in our life world cannot be done without first having chosen which governmental rationality one wishes to have ruling our society. – Antoinette Rouvroy2

1 2

Benjamin 2019, p. 1. Rouvroy 2011, p. 136.

Nony, A., Performative Images: A Philosophy of Video Art Technology in France. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463722827_ch03

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Where Darkness Matters It is July 1991 in New York. You enter a dark, wide, shallow space at the Museum of Modern Art and see three mural-sized video projections along one wall. Confronted with the large scale of the installation (each image is ten feet high by seven feet wide), you stand against the opposite side of the room, attempting to grasp what is being presented at once. The three videos begin simultaneously with a saturated white light that gradually fills the space of the room. Slowly, the central panel, which functions independently from the two others, reveals shades of grey that give shape to a figure. The camera goes back and forth above the central figure in a regular and continuous fashion, following a path that gradually expands the field of vision, creating a scanning and electronically programmed quality to the image. In the central video, a body is seen laying on its back as a sculptural figure that is being shaped by the scanning device, while the two side screens develop a continuous variation of colours—purple, black, and blue—at the periphery. Your gaze is drawn by the central panel, where the lighting contrast exposes the silhouette of a Black male performer lying on his back and seen from above. Too soon, you are staring at this almost naked body wrapped in a shroud. Speechless, the museum obliges you to look at this body passing horizontally in your field of vision. The scene is silent. The body floats in the museum space; it is bigger than yours. Sometimes the figure stares back at you despite the fact that your gaze (horizontal) and his (vertical) take the shape of an impossible encounter. In Thierry Kuntzel’s Hiver (La mort de Robert Walser) (Winter (The Death of Robert Walser)) the camera is used as a scanner that dissects the body into separable fragments (head, chest, belly, hips, legs, and feet). The piece was designed as an electronic triptych whose central frame uses a motion-controlled camera to recreate the effect of a scanning device. In this visual experience, the photographed body of a Black male performer is shot from above and is screened as if your gaze is conducting a clinical examination. You, the spectator, are like a drone that is examining the body of a static object lying on the ground. As a whole, this 5 min. 30 sec. video installation was made of three projectors, two video players, and a system of synchronization. It was performed in a continuous loop within the setting of the museum, first produced and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) in the summer of 1991 as part of the Project Series.3 Barbara London, who founded the video programme in the 3 Renamed Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series in 2006, this contemporary art programme was created in 1971 for emerging artists to present their work and to bring video/film in into the museum.

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film department of the museum in 1977, commissioned Kuntzel’s piece, which, according to the press release, “explores time and memory and the impact of subliminal images on the viewer.”4 In the different brochures accompanying the exhibition at MoMA, there is no mention of the rather complex and no less problematic structure of the installation: a triptych with a central panel where a Black man lies as if dead, covered in a white shroud, and scanned by the mechanically programmed movement of a camera. Not mentioning the body of a Black male performer in numerous descriptions of the piece stirs up a rather perverse relation to difference, to recall a formulation used by David Marriott. In such a relation, Marriott explains, “the fetish acts as a defence against more intolerable forms of anxiety, while allowing subjects to enjoy this fear more or less secretly, more or less violently.”5 A rather perverse violence is found in the words of Michael Brenson, a New York Times art critic at the time, who qualified the piece as a “deceptively simple video.”6 For Brenson, the figure presented in Hiver (La mort de Robert Walser) “is not a corpse: he swallows, he opens and closes his eyes, his calves are so muscular that he seems to have just come out of a weight room.”7 In his words, we sense the rather vicious deception that the body is indeed not dead while reducing the performer’s subjectivity to the clichéd figure of the male gym-goer. Brenson suggests the veil and the topic of the crucifixion, yet the only death mentioned is the one of writer Robert Walser, found dead in the snow in 1956.8 In what he sees as being “a bed of white rumpled sheets,” Brenson poses the video’s “hypnotic, almost—but definitely not entirely—voyeuristic seductiveness” as its main strength. Unaware of the numerous critiques deployed in the late ’80s on how the white gaze transformed Black bodies into cultural artifacts, Brenson concludes his short review with an objection: “But the sheets are rumpled; someone manipulated them even as we were watching, which gives the video a slightly 4 Press release 1991. 5 Marriott 2010, p. 216. 6 Brenson 1991, p. 23. 7 Ibid. 8 Swiss poet and novelist Robert Walser was a major influence on writers such as Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka—two writers that make cultural critiques of alienation and power. Walser was found dead in the snow on Christmas Day of 1956—a death he foretold in his first novel The Tanners (1907). More importantly, Walser was someone who was robbed of his physical subjectivity by being institutionalized. In the sanatorium where he spent nearly thirty years of his life, Walser developed micro-scripts—texts and poems he had written in a coded alphabet. In the installation, Kuntzel mobilizes this history of isolation, coded creativity, and a body subjected to the discipline of technology.

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racy air.”9 “Racy,” as a qualifier, does not sound neutral. Brenson’s comment exposes Black male homosexuality as something “other” and, more so, out of place in the context of a museum installation. It seems like the critique, too, turned Moody’s body into a repressed sexual object, to both justify and reject the critic’s fantasy, as the sheets are moving only because the performer is indeed alive and thus breathing. I open this chapter on programmed life and racialized technesis by looking at Kuntzel’s video work because in it I see the work of a technologically discursive logic that erases subjectivity. The systematic omission of the presence of the Black performer is symptomatic of the dominant white culture that is so blind that it does not see Ken Moody’s body. I believe that this discursive logic is the consequence of a grid of intelligibility 10 that has not been conceptualized to integrate the complexities of subjecthood and positionality. I start with this omission to draw attention to the interrelated dimensions of technology, culture, and historical realities. This chapter draws attention to race in relation to technology by focusing on visual tools, discrete-state machines, and video experiments as enabling the distribution and ongoing instrumentalization of the lifeworld. Located at the centre of interdisciplinary debates concerning the global structure of systemic inequalities, race is understood as a decisive axiom for the deployment of hegemonic forms of power that are programmed and operated by technology. In the now famous definition formulated by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”11 This definition emphasizes the interrelated dynamics between premature death and the legal and extra-legal ramifications in which racist policies are inscribed to justify and impose powerlessness. In an essay from 2019 entitled “Technology of Neo-Colonial Episteme,” I focused on the concomitant rise of behavioural psychology and cybernetics platforms of control. I tried to show that colonial and neo-colonial empires created technical objects, such as the cephalometre, that inscribe a hierarchy of value between people to produce a form of knowledge that becomes both the condition and the legitimation of racial enterprises, including what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls epistemicides.12 Neo-colonial épistémés have been integrated into the informational layers of society, acting at an infrastructural level to shape the very ground of surveillance, servitude, 9 10 11 12

Brenson 1991, p. 23. On the notion of the colonial grid of intellegibility, see Albarrán 2020. Gilmore 2007, p. 247. See de Sousa Santos 2014.

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and control. Thinking about the informational technology of governance, I extended the earlier hypothesis of the pre-emption theory of technology offered in “Anxiety in the Society of Preemption: On Simondon and the Noopolitics of the Milieu” (2017) in which pre-emption was understood as a power that operates on people’s memories, behaviours, and desires. In the case of both the neo-colonial episteme and pre-emption, technology plays a central role in implementing programmed life onto racialized bodies. I pointed to the systemic, operational, and performative dimensions of racism that programme life. In the present chapter, I build on these two essays to continue to comprehend further how specific usage of technology have drastic consequences for the production of subjectivity. I locate tools and technologies as operating together in the dispossession, exploitation, and production of socially stratified beings.13 I acknowledge that “premature death” and “programmed life” are not the same but let me explain why the operations of programmed life can help us to understand the premature death imposed upon racialized bodies. In La matrice de la race: Généalogie sexuelle et colonial de la nation française, Elsa Dorlin draws a scientific and historical genealogy of the nation-state to show how the pathologizing of gendered and racialized bodies is a condition for the deployment of modern racism and sexism. Governmental techniques of domination are deployed via scientific enterprises (medical, environmental, but also pedagogical and cultural) to sustain the programming of bodies in service of the nation-state. In other words, race is a means of state enterprise for domination.14 In the name of scientific experiments, race is often used to perform various tasks that engage the cause/consequence paradigm of our current system of societal recognition.15 Yet, this paradigm has left unattended the question of the condition of possibility that race legitimized and how this condition became an alibi for the implementation of “raciologic experiments.”16 These experiments aimed to develop an anthropology based on a hierarchy of value that legitimated the colonial enterprise. Such an experimental raciology functioned to create the scientific rationale legitimizing the imperial expansion of the colonial state by technical means.17 This chapter focuses on the notion of programme to read together discrete-state machines and newly engendered technologies of surveillance 13 14 15 16 17

Buolamwini and Gebru 2018, p. 1. Guillaumin 1981, p. 65. See Nakamura 2002. Chamayou 2008, p. 350. Ibid., p. 354.

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and control as enabling the accumulation and dispossession central to racial capitalism.18 I focus on Césaire’s notion of the chosification of being 19 and read it in the age of digital computing and computational capitalism. The chosification of being under regimes of coloniality strongly resonates with the codification and automation of behaviour under capitalism. I understand computational capitalism as defined by Jonathan Beller as: “the informatic organization of life for profitable value extraction along vectors of social difference.”20 The continuous imposition of state-produced technological biases into the legal stratification of society questions the “increased convergence of capitalization and computational sovereignty.”21 I look at chosification as a programme for value extraction and the melting of signification into computation, calculation, and data-tracking within systems of oppression. I am interested in a genealogy that links together the implementation of corporal commodification, discrete-state machines used to extract data, and the increased chosification of racialized life. This genealogy aims to show that the experience and theory of interpellation based on subjectivation (Fanon, Althusser) calls for a re-examination in an age where discrete-state machines gradually operate with other machines without relying on human interactions. At a time when media increasingly operates below the threshold of human consciousness,22 the discursive formation of race, based on the logic of epidermalization and objecthood, needs to be revaluated from the standpoint of operations of governance in which algorithms and digital devices play a central role.23 These technologies formalize a systemic shift in the operational logistics of governance by implementing “epistemic, epistemological and semiotic alterations.”24 In the words of philosopher of law Antoinette Rouvroy, these alterations “due to the digital turn have had fundamental consequences on the normative metabolism, that is, on the very making of norms and how they breed obedience.”25 In other words, the advent of digital technology imposes a shift in the disciplinary effects in society in the sense that discrete-state machines make racialized bodies both the target and the vectors of racist policy making. Because digital 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Chakravartty and Ferreira da Silva 2012, pp. 361–85. Césaire 2000, p. 23. Beller 2018, p. 165. Ibid., p. 171. Hansen 2015. Noble 2018. Rouvroy and Stiegler 2016, p. 6. Ibid., p.6.

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technology is a revolution in the modelling of the real (as in opportunities and lived experiences), it requires a critique that reinvents itself through new means of categorization. The magisterial work of legal scholar Latanya Sweeney reveals not only the biases inscribed in technologically driven networks (from access to credit cards and mortgages, to access to educational opportunities and voting rights) but highlights that “technology design is the new policy maker.”26 This affirmation resonates with academics and activists advocating for a radical critique of technological vectors of racism, colonialism, and systemic oppression. In this chapter, I gesture towards the notion of “racialized technesis” to account for the long genealogy of tools, devices, and experiments that legitimize the conditions for the implementation of racist norms in society. Kuntzel’s video work functions as an entry point to think critically about historical realities (the concomitant raise of the Far Right in France and the AIDS pandemic), technological innovations (the development of the world wide web and the diffusion of portable cameras), and societal events (the L.A. riots). I believe that the insidious instrumentalization of the racialized body has undergone systemic changes in the context of today’s data-driven gover­ nance. Digital devices make the monitoring, capturing, and mining of bodies in time and space possible. To tackle this concern and possibly contribute to an already compelling literature on the question of the surveillance and technology of discrimination, I propose to tell the story of a work of art made by a white male artist from France and first performed in New York in the early 1990s. This work is symptomatic of a certain assemblage of history (the AIDS years, the L.A. riots, the rise of fascist politics in France) and technology (the birth of the world wide web, the increased computational dimension of experience, the implementation of surveillance apparatus and disciplinary networks of control). The deployment of both medical devices such as MRI and X-ray and operations of control are simultaneously increased by techniques of regulation such as scanners, metal detectors, AI technologies of facial recognition and DNA profiling. If Michel Foucault warned us against the development of an apparatus of surveillance that produces subjugated knowledge—a knowledge written out of history—the deployment of scanning devices and their proliferation in the digital age forces us to think about the modes of traceability and data mining that are constantly writing upon us. By looking at the relationship between historical events, automatic computing, and human agency, I aim to contribute to the 26 See Latanya Sweeney in conversation with founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, Joy Buolamwini, April 26, 2019.

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revaluation of race (understood as a societal, political, and technological function) in the digital age to further question the pre-emptive power of technological operations on racialized bodies.

Technically Abstracted Racism The brochures, and to a certain extent the vast majority of the scholarship on Hiver (La mort de Robert Walser), argue that time is the main topic explored by Kuntzel “in all its phenomenological, existential, and cultural manifestations.”27 Time indeed, is a critical part of the cultural gesture offered by Kuntzel’s video installation, as Hiver (La mort de Robert Walser) was part of a five-part audio-visual installation project titled Quatre Saisons (Plus ou moins une) (Four Seasons (More or Less)).28 It engaged with the seventeenth-century French painter Nicolas Poussin’s paintings Les Quatre Saisons ou Le cours de l’Histoire (Four Seasons or the Flow of History), a series of four pastoral paintings that portray the passing of time and the cyclical unfolding of history within it. According to one of the brochures for Hiver at the MoMA, for each season Kuntzel wanted “to deal with one body, one representational space, and the real space of the viewer, who is unable to see everything with one glance.”29 In the brochures, Kuntzel is presented as a “modern-day druid”30 who is “drawn to the mysterious, dark side of the soul.”31 There is an importance given to Kuntzel’s intellectual attributes: he is an established theorist who teaches at a university and who engages with male European writers such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Robert Walser, Henri Michaux, Pierre Corneille, and Raymond Roussel 27 C.L. 1991, p. 20. 28 Kuntzel’s Quatre Saisons (Plus ou moins une) is made of Hiver, la mort de Robert Walser, three other video installations Été (double vue) (Summer (Double Sight)) 1989, Printemps (pas de Printemps) (Spring (Dance of Spring / No Spring)) 1993, and Automne (Éloge de l’ombre) (Autumn (In Praise of Shadow)) 1997, and a sound installation Moins une (autobiographie d’une autre) (One Less (Autobiography of Another)). Kuntzel’s installation Hiver (la mort de Robert Walser) directly refers to Hiver, for which Poussin chose the theme of the deluge borrowed from the Old Testament to exploit symbols tied to the hibernal season: a lugubrious scene, a veiled sun, and a tone of dark greys that add to the dramatic intensity of the pictorial composition. Tim Murray gives a superb account of Kuntzel’s appropriation of Poussin’s arcadian series in his chapter titled “Et in Arcadia Video: Poussin’ the Image of Culture with Thierry Kuntzel and Louis Marin,” pp. 58–81. 29 C.L., p. 21. 30 Ibid., p. 20. 31 London 1991, p. 6.

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(Virginia Woolf being the rare female figure Thierry Kuntzel commented upon). In opposition to the complex druid-like f igure of the artist, the structure of Kuntzel’s installation is systematically defined as “simple” and little is said about the technical setting that captures the image of the performer. Barbara London explained that “Kuntzel was interested in the way simple patterns of light depicting ordinary representational images can have a deep, emotional impact on the viewer’s mind.”32 While time is certainly an important theme developed by Kuntzel, an effort seems to be made to erase the body of African American performer Ken Moody to focus on rather abstract themes. In these documents, the “darkness” of the body is confusingly associated with a lack of light, avoiding acknowledging the fact that the spectator is indeed staring at a large-size image of Black body projected horizontally onto a wall. Furthermore, each time Ken Moody’s name is mentioned in the brochures and related articles, Moody’s body seems to belong to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Moody became a star-like figure through Mapplethorpe’s portraits.33 This systematic dismissal of Ken Moody’s body and career reinforces the agentless dimension of his portrayal. For the production of the central video, Ken Moody lay under a motioncontrolled camera that passed over him. The camera was mounted to a trail that paralleled Moody’s body. Shot from a high-angle, the camera was programmed to follow an 8-shape movement by moving up and down as well as closer and further away from him. The camera approaches the body and moves away from it, while moving up and down in a perfectly fluid movement. Never presented in its entirety, the body is scanned by this technical eye that sweeps over it in an unchanging trajectory. The central panel is made of three of these passes, each increasing the amplitude of the shot and reinforcing the infinity sign. In a notebook, Kuntzel describes the effect produced by the camera: The day following the shooting. I have brutally gone from melancholy to terror. […] With Winter, no escape, or subterfuge: even if the image is tripled, the left and right panels are not necessarily intended to be seen – pure time 32 Ibid., p. 1. 33 Remembered for his sensitive yet blunt treatment of controversial subject matters such as sexuality and homoeroticism, Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in March 1989, a year before Kuntzel’s installation was created. While there is much to say about Mapplethorpe, the Black book now stands as an important testimony: a collection of images of people that, for the most part, died from AIDS. It stands, like the image of body cameras used in police departments in the US, to question the governance by brutality of the system.

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flows there, peripherally, on the edge –: straight ahead at the centre, the genesis of a representation, its alteration and its disappearance in a register of stupor. Can I sustain this unnameable, this block of perception for which there are no words? […] Here a season of the body, and of a mortal cycle, perhaps a reversal of time. Body amongst those returned from the dead. Born again, why the persistence of Renaissance codes? Summer’s perspective, Winter’s drapery. This body in repose, what dead Christ, hardly recognizable (dark)?34

On the tape, Moody emerges wrapped in a draped fabric. The sheer white veil functions like a translucent filter that allows us to see through it while keeping its object at a distance. The veins of the body and the curves of the drapery trace the contours of Moody’s figure, at times indistinguishable from the white background that engulfs his dark-skinned body, making it disappear from the field of vision. As Anne-Marie Duguet points out, “In this sculpture where fabric and body are combined, the folds of one caught up in the folds of the other, the drapery is, as Leonardo da Vinci wished it, an ‘inhabited form’ but dangerously so, for it is an accomplice of the machine carrying out the work of death.”35 It is precisely the work of death and death at work in the image that is being programmed by the camera mounted as a scanning-device. The visual apparatus is not only geared to produce terror, but the central figure of the Black male performer is programmed to announce its recognizable death. There is no escape in this installation: in the central panel, the computercontrolled camera follows the path of an infinity symbol, and its image is flanked by two projections on each side. As an audience, you stare at Ken Moody’s body as an entombed corpse that is being dissected by the camera. Kuntzel explained that he did not want an upright image “because it was not as violent, on the body, as a horizontal one.”36 In Hiver (La mort de Robert Walser), the body is undead: not dead yet. It stands in the horizon of a death to come: a premature death performed in a liminal space that separates a diaphanous shroud. The triptych structure of the installation, the horizontality of the shot, and the white shroud transform the body into a dark Christ. It recalls Andrea Mantegna’s piece The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ from the fifteenth century, which presents a rare instance of a scene of lamentation where the Christ is not presented on the cross but 34 Kuntzel 2006, p. 588. 35 Duguet 2010, p. 62. 36 Kuntzel 2006, p. 589.

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lying on his back, in the aftermath of the sacrifice. Hiver (La mort de Robert Walser) mimics Mantegna’s pictorial construction: the folds of the veil, the lying on the back, and the high angle shot from which the scene is depicted. The intrusiveness of the camera has transformed the video installation into an inescapable place where the screen no longer functions as a window from which the audience projects itself onto one representation of the real as in narrative cinema. On the contrary, the screen functions as a dead end where modalities of representation are entombed.

Video Extraction and Corporal Commodity The emergence of a regime of terror that is central to the aesthetic framework of the video installation interrogates the sacrificial ground in which the body of the African American performer is presented. The exhibition of Kuntzel’s video work in July 1991 coincides with the first time that police brutality was caught on videotape in the United States. I refer here to the Sony Handycam video footage taken by George Holliday of the March 3, 1991 beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police. The raw footage of the beating was broadcast on national television on March 7, 1991. The four white officers were acquitted a year later, which sparked the infamous Los Angeles riots of 1992 in which fifty-four people died during a five-day protest.37 Holliday’s video footage is considered to be the first viral video of police brutality in the pre-Internet age and Holliday to be one of the first new media citizen journalists. This notion of citizen journalism highlights the active role people play in gathering and reporting evidence of injustice. Video technology increasingly functions as a political tool to prove facts of police violence and murder, as seen in the multiplication of video-based evidence gathered by citizens. Such a technology and the broadcasting platforms that have emerged through social media contribute to claim justice when more official forms of information propagate false reports. One poignant example is Rabih Mroué’s 2012 lecture-performance, titled The Pixalated Revolution, about the use of mobile phones during the Syrian revolution.38 In The Pixalated Revolution, the viewer sees images captured from a hand and the floor and narrated by the trembling voice of families fighting for their lives. In other words, smartphone videos have become, in many geo-political instances, a modality to capture realities through 37 See Crenshaw and Peller 1993. 38 https://kadist.org/work/the-pixelated-revolution/

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the opaque smoke of bombs and the shaking hands of witnesses of police brutality. Contrary to the spontaneous capture of video footage, as seen in media citizen journalists’ witnessing life-threatening situations, in Hiver (La mort de Robert Walser), the camera is programmed to dissect the body in an automated and controlled fashion. It gradually expands the field of visual capture, creating a scanning and electronically programmed quality to the movement; a characteristic similar to the one of MRI devices. In the central video, the body is seen as a sculptural figure being shaped by the meticulous movement of the device. The intrusive movement with which the body is shot is analogous to the operating theatre, wherein an audience can watch surgeons perform. The bright light of the operating theatre reveals a body without shadow and without depth: it is a flattened body reduced to clinical observation. Unlike MRI devices, which produce loud and almost unbearable noises, Kuntzel’s entire video is silent. In this case, the muteness of the technological operation highlights the intrusiveness of the camera. While medical interventions most often require a human presence, namely a doctor, a nurse, or a technician, in Hiver (La mort de Robert Walser) the programmed camera performs the visual operation. This setting departs from the horizontal perspective of the human gaze and replaces it with a bird’s eye view or planar drone-like angle of vision. In the video, there is no illusion of a perspectival space in which the viewer can find refuge. On the contrary, the camera is as precise and as intrusive as a scalpel. It brings the audience inside the body. In Kuntzel’s installation the scanner-like aesthetic of the apparatus evokes the transnational market for organs, where the indistinguishable inside of the body becomes more mobile than the body of the migrant who seeks refuge. This conjunction between medical and surveillance technologies creates organs without bodies, and the mobility of these organs contrasts with the immobility of those bodies that do not have the right to cross borders, thus exposing the dehumanizing effects of such technologies. The video presents a context in which to account for the analogy between the development of devices that make the body disappear into data, and operations of regulation that track the movement of people in time and space. The scanning apparatus of the video calls into question the specific use of computer-programmed technology that is deployed to detect, track, and exploit the body. Instead of a subject being addressed by these devices, it is the data that this body might produce that is being tracked and extracted. To a certain extent, Kuntzel’s video installation helps us distinguish two different regimes of operation. The first has to do with the scanning device

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in the central frame, which mechanically discretizes a particular image of the body and reveals the medical trope that resonates with mechanisms of control and the use of technical objects to monitor people. The second regime of visual operation has to do with the two frames located on the edge. Made of blue, black, and purple colours that fluctuate constantly while the scanning device operates, these two panels allow for other categories of knowledge to emerge outside of the figural trope of visual presentation. However, the two side images are not necessarily made to be watched. They function at the periphery, to expand the exploratory duration of the visual experience and decentralize the gaze from the central panel’s regime of terror and capture. In Hiver (La mort de Robert Walser), the camera is used as a scanner that discretizes the body into separable fragments. This use of the camera calls into question the deployment of a regime of surveillance in which a person is no longer being addressed as an individual (when the camera acts like a gaze), but instead is reduced to a corpse subjected to examination (when the camera is a scanner preforming a clinical operation). This use of the camera exemplifies a shift from a society of discipline where a subject is interpellated to produce an identity with a societal function, to a society of control where an individual is pre-empted from their capacity to act as a subject and agent.39 The operations of capture (of information about movement, relation, and communication) at play in the society of control are those in which technologies track and wrap the individual into a set of quantifiable abstractions, thus emptying their ability to act, move, and become otherwise in the world. Here, the camera as a scanning device preempts the presence of the individual: meaning that a technical object that operates outside the realm of the individual’s sensory perception dissects their presence. Important in this context is the proliferation of technical apparatuses where the function of a technical operation (IDs, regulatory passes, biometric passports, etc.) creates the conditions of a specific political agenda. In this context, the revaluation of power dynamics fostered by institutions requires us to look at the function of the technical framework that regulates the condition of the social subject under surveillance. In Kuntzel’s piece, the video becomes a trap: an inescapable place in which images are extracted from the body through technically programmed means. By offering the medical trope of the data mining of the body, Kuntzel’s video pushes us to interrogate how technical operations of bodily capture ultimately led to the imposition of programmed life and premature death. In this body-mining context, in the age of both electronic and digital surveillance, 39 See Deleuze 2018.

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race cannot only be understood as an embodied discourse but needs to be accounted for as the product of a technical operation for which racial discrimination stands as a condition for surveillance, discipline, and control. The data mining of the body becomes a means to theorize technologies of racialization and the invisible violence of modes of technical surveillance and their power to shape discrimination. Thierry Kuntzel’s video installation pushes us to recognize the power of ideological discourses and reveals the power of rhetoric to serve a political agenda.

Racism, or the Imagination at Work in the Imaginary Intrusive techniques of bodily capture such as the ones used in imperial systems of calculation and valuation were massively deployed in the 1990s in France, a period that marks the reinforcement of anti-immigration policies in Europe. The “Pasqua law,” voted in in 1993 by the right-wing coalition and named after the French interior minister Charles Pasqua, imposed repressive measures that rendered formerly legal migration illegal. 40 At the same time, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extreme-right National Front party gained a significant part of the French electorate with its demand to expel, among others, Muslim immigrants from France. In a talk given for the 8th congress of the National Front on April 3, 1990, Le Pen called for awareness concerning a disease that was spreading all over the country—what he termed “le SIDA politique” (“political AIDS”). Known as the syndrome of immune deficiency, Le Pen claimed that what was attacking the French body politic was analogous to AIDS, both a homonym and an acronym that, in French, stands for Socialisme, Immigration, Drogue, and Affairisme (Socialism, Immigration, Drugs, and Venality). Le Pen’s AIDS analogy was particularly timely as France, among other countries, faced the climax of what would be called “the AIDS years” by the French magazine Le Gai Pied in March 1990. This analogy between migrants and people living with HIV played on the fears of Le Pen’s electorate, encouraging them to believe that refugees were the cause of “political AIDS” and to view both migrants and individuals diagnosed with HIV as victims of their own promiscuous lifestyles and unsafe behaviours. In the context of this dialectic—between the self who represents the French territorial body and the non-singularized others that stand for parasitic outsiders—immigration is represented as a global pandemic from which France should be rescued. 40 See Hamilton et al. 2021.

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The AIDS/HIV analogy also resonated with Le Pen’s discursive imagining of the French nation as a sovereign body whose territory needed to be protected from invaders. In the context of this analogy, laws and borders are used as rhetorical tools to regiment and maintain the lowest risk of infection. Jacques Derrida commented on Le Pen’s speech in an interview with Bernard Stiegler, highlighting the pervasive rhetoric of racism and nationalism within FN’s understanding of territory: To the classical idea of the territorial border as line of defence, Le Pen henceforth prefers the figure, at once apt and old-fashioned, of “a living membrane that admits only what is benef icial.” If it were capable of calculating this filtration in advance, a living organism might achieve immortality, but in order to do so, it would have to die in advance to let itself die or kill itself in advance, for fear of being altered by what comes from outside, by the other, period. Hence the theater of death to which racisms, biologisms, organicisms, eugenics are so often given, and sometimes philosophies of life. […] (The line is a skin, a selecting “membrane” admitting only the homogeneous or the homogenizable, the assimilable, or rather that which is heterogeneous but considered to be “beneficial”: the appropriable immigrant, the immigrant who is clean and proper.)41

Racism and nationalism are two sides of a same coin: a territorial empire of political thoughts and actions that selects and assimilates that which is beneficial for the growth of its dominant ruling class. According to the Front National (France’s far right National Front political party), the nation-state is defined in two specific ways. First, it only represents la France métropolitaine, which designates the territories of the French republic located in the West.42 Second, the French territory is anthropomorphized into a human body with an immune system; what lies beyond its borders is a field of bacterium that weakens the economy and the cultural authorities of French superiority. Such sanitary arguments recall commonly used governmental strategies that historically stigmatized specific communities, such as women, in the 41 Derrida in Derrida and Stiegler 2007, p. 19. 42 La France métropolitaine is only a small part of what Léopold Lambert calls France’s “colonial continuum,” which includes former colonies up until their independence. La France d’Outre-Mer, a legislative status created in 1946, designates T.O.M. Territoires d’Outre-Mer (overseas territories) such as Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane, Réunion, and Mayotte, and D.O.M. Domaines d’OutreMer (overseas districts). Lambert 2021, p. 53.

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name of hygienic conditions and public salubrity. 43 Moreover, the blood contamination through which HIV is primarily transmitted evokes both the rejection of métissage (interbreeding), whose development is seen as weakening France’s supremacy according to the FN, and the stigmatization of homosexuals, artists, and intravenous drug users, who were the first to be hit by the spread of HIV in the 1980s and ’90s. In Le Pen’s political discourse, a medical trope is used to explain the effect of migration and is put forward as the cause of a disease. By collapsing racial discrimination and medical symptoms, Le Pen’s analogy functions as a symbol of his political agenda and operates on an ideological level to approach race and health as a matter of national concern. The effective strength of Le Pen’s analogy between disease and migration resides in the fact that it is both an illusion and an allusion to reality—two characteristics fundamental to the structure and functioning of ideology. In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Louis Althusser points out the ambivalent relationship fostered by falsified representations: while admitting that they [ideological representations] do not correspond to reality, i.e. that they constitute an illusion, we admit that they do make allusion to reality, and that they need only be “interpreted” to discover the reality of the world behind their imaginary representation of that world (ideology = illusion/allusion). 44

In the context of Le Pen’s analogy, the allusion operates on the basis of a shared structure: acts of migrating and contractions of AIDS are global phenomena. From here, it follows that the falsified representation of the world presented by the FN (migrants = HIV-positive people) is “only” partially incorrect because the allusion operates effectively on a structural level. Conversely, the illusion is anchored in an imaginary distortion that poses immigration and AIDS as the causes of France’s sick political system. Whereas the structural relation is based on an allusion to global phenomena, the causal relation is “only” the effect of Le Pen’s “vivid imagination.”45 The causal relation of his analogy is based on the illusion created by an imaginary relation. Althusser offers two distinct types of interpretation of such an imaginary relation: a mechanistic interpretation that defines Priests and Despots as the “cause for the imaginary transposition of the real conditions 43 Dorlin 2009, pp. 34–60. 44 Althusser 1970, p. 39. 45 Spinoza 2004, p. 19.

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of existence,” and a hermeneutic interpretation that defines the “material alienation which reigns in the conditions of existence” as the cause of the imaginary transposition. 46 Even though Le Pen’s discourse could easily be assigned to the f irst category of interpretation (as no one in France better exemplifies the figure of a contemporary despot), Althusser’s text is based on a subtler point of view. For Althusser, ideology functions as the representation of a rapport imaginaire (imaginary connection) to a real relation that is concerned with the materialistic conditions of existence of individuals. 47 What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations that govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live. 48 In the context of Le Pen’s analogy, the imaginary of his electorate is yielded by a representation—‘le SIDA politique” (“political AIDS”)—that operates as a satirical image. The amount of sarcasm it takes to state that migrants are the threatening force of a political system not only “mocks” and “takes pleasure in the powerlessness and distress of men,” but it forges the satirical ground from which a mutilated idea of the real emerges. 49 The mutilated idea of the real is caused by the imaginary distortion of the representation: its illusion. However, such mutilated knowledge is nonetheless an allusion to reality and functions as a satirical image, which produces hatred and revulsion towards marginalized bodies. Le Pen’s SIDA politique is a satire in the sense that it feeds, in the words of Deleuze, “on accusations, on malice, on belittlement, on low interpretations.”50 The imaginary relation presented to individuals by ideological systems is powerful in shaping their relation to the real precisely because individuals continue to cultivate their own collective imagination, or in Spinozist terms, because individuals produce an inadequate and yet powerful knowledge of their real condition of existence.51 In other words, ideology is a system that dominates individual minds by imposing an all-encompassing veil between the real and the collective praxis of the imagination related to the real. In such an ideological apparatus or system of representation, the distortion is intrusive in the sense that it filters the relations between collective beings. Ideology is more powerful when it leads collective individuals 46 Althusser 1970, p. 39. 47 Ibid., p. 40. 48 Ibid. 49 Deleuze 2003, p. 13. 50 Ibid. 51 Spinoza 2004, p. 27.

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to act differently from what they imagine, by imposing an alienating gap or imaginary relation that prevents engaging with the collective conditions of existence. From a Spinozist point of view, immigration and the contraction of AIDS have nothing in common at the level of essence but share a whole world at the level of existence: stigmatization, discrimination, and scapegoating. Simultaneously, such an ideological apparatus allows individuals to cultivate the work of their own imagination. What makes ideological systems so efficient is that they present collective individuals with a common imaginary framework from which every individual continues to perform the singular work of their imagination, without relating to the collective condition of existence grounded in the real. It seems then that the more the imagination is at work, the more it feeds the operative system of such imaginary structures. Questioning the doubling of relations at work in ideology (i.e., ideology as representation that operates both as illusion and allusion to reality) leaves the door open to two intricate debates: one concerned with a relational ontology grounded in the work of the imagination and, following a Spinozist tradition, tethered to a non-symmetrical relation to falsity and truth; while the other concerned with an operative milieu that takes causal immanence as the pre-individual process from which collective individuals can act. Yet, starting in the political and aesthetic context of 1990s France, what seemed a useful definition of the work of the imaginary relation in Althusser now requires some major updates. The digital has to do with a crisis of representation precisely because the work of Big Data ideology is cancelling out all meaning. As Rouvroy suggests, data transforms things into calculable entities by adding an operative layer of a-signification to the functioning of the real.52 We are no longer dealing with representational politics or the function of content in the making of politics. We are dealing with the operation of a-signification performed by digital platforms that saturate attention with emptied signification. In other words, what we are about to discuss is how data substitute themselves to reality by operating as signs to what they represent, leaving the door open to pervasive forms of manipulation, abstraction, and dispossession of the real condition of experience.

Race, Racism, and Raciology By contrasting the model of interpellation with that of technical pre-emption, this chapter aims to move away from a definition of race understood as the 52 Rouvroy cited in Rouvroy and Stiegler 2016, p. 8.

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consequence of a political framework infused by ideology, to question race as an operation of a political system that benefits from the a priori neutrality of technology. Race functions in a system to legitimize its discriminatory logic, and as such it is the condition of the operability of its ordering system. Technological apparatuses of surveillance point out the deployment of a regime in which the state apparatus and its security policies are intrinsically linked to the business of the Big Data economy. By Big Data, I refer to an economy ruled by registration, traceability, and computational operations that pre-empt information before the latter is available as information for the subject. In that context Big Data is the imposition of an “info-servitude” because of the level of abstraction and a-signification that is generated via computer-mediated images.53 The digital has found a way to maximize the pre-emption of information on a massive scale and operate the regulation of this information at the speed of light. In this context, I question race as a condition in politics and the politics to which this condition may respond. Proposing that race has been created as an alibi to serve a political and economic agenda is to understand race as an operation, technology, and prosthesis to serve the pre-emptive logic of dispossession that programmes life to cause premature death. The revaluation of technologically driven operations and their subsequent power dynamics requires a look at the function of the technical framework that regulates the condition of the social subject under surveillance. In her introduction to Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne questions how “an understanding of the ontological conditions of blackness is integral to develop a general theory of surveillance.”54 Browne’s book reveals a longer and more complex historiography of surveillance, discipline, and punishment by grounding the enslavement of Black subjectivities as the productive force shaping contemporary forms of surveillance technologies. In her chapter “Notes on Surveillance Studies: Through the Door of No Return,” Browne reads the archival material of the slave trade (the plan of the slave ship Brooks from 1789) with the schematic plan of the Panopticon from 1786. Browne points out that when Jeremy Bentham travelled to Russia, where he would first conceive of the Panopticon, he embarked on a boat with “24 passengers on the deck, all Turks; besides eighteen young Negresses (slaves) under the hatches.”55 This historical fact is a symptom of a long-neglected relation between 53 Beller 2018, p. 166. 54 Browne 2015, p. 8. 55 Bentham cited in ibid., p. 31.

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disciplinary society and slavery, and leads Browne to ask: “If Bentham’s Panopticon depended on an exercise of power where the inspector sees everything while remaining unseen, how might the view from ‘under the hatches’ be another site from which to conceptualize the operation of power?.”56 By examining the operation of surveillance central to slavery, Browne activates an architectural shift in the conception of control and places the horizontal structure of the ship and the walking of white men above enslaved bodies as the operative modality for thinking about systems of surveillance imposed upon racialized bodies. Building a genealogy of surveillance and punishment from “under the hatches” underscores how the realization of the condition of surveillance is linked to the realization of the condition of racialization. Surveillance and racialization, that is the making of a racialized subjectivity to serve the parameters of a political agenda, has become a paradigmatic dimension of twenty-first-century domination. In the context of digital surveillance and the systemic tracking of racialized bodies, the predominant model of the Panopticon has recently fallen short in addressing “how racism and antiblackness undergird and sustain the intersecting surveillance of our present order.”57 Browne offers a path to revisit the predominant model of the Panopticon (a seeing machine for both incarceration and workforce supervision based on verticality) by investigating how disciplinary society has always been grounded in racialized technologies that serve an economic system—as seen in the slave labour of mining and plantation exploitations. In my view, Browne’s inquiry into surveillance studies, from “under the hatches,” strongly resonates with the now submedial (i.e., the algorithmicallyrun media sphere) layer of operationality that dictates mediated images of the real. The submedial designates the space behind the surface where an opaque layer of operationality drives the medial economy of meaning and signs.58 This operative layer that performs in the opaque space of manipulation between storage and exchange echoes the pre-emptive architecture of incarceration where subjectivities are reduced to non-meaning related things. Browne’s mode of historical inquiry opens a path to reinvest the question of surveillance by taking into consideration how the imposition of race has been instrumental in building our contemporary system of control. I read the horizontal f igure in Thierry Kuntzel’s piece, as well as the programmed camera that captures the body of Ken Moody, as an 56 Ibid., p. 32. 57 Ibid., p. 9. 58 Groys 2012, p. 29.

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opportunity to question the control by design of racialized bodies. Kuntzel’s installation presents the discrete-state machine and the distribution of images to question the long genealogy of bodily capture that intersects with surveillance technologies. In Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Safiya Umoja Noble demonstrates the racist and sexist bias embedded in software technologies by underlying the “algorithmic conceptualization of a variety of people and ideas.”59 Her work shows that social inequality is reinforced by deep-machine projects and software applications that potentially further racial injustice.60 For example, in the context of the courtroom sentencing software Northpointe, used by judges in the United States to assess the probability of future criminality in defendants, this algorithmically driven regime of control systematically rereproduces the biases inherent to society and leads to the over incarceration of African American suspects.61 In this software, systems of injustice, logics of discrimination, and operational statistics have morphed into a single entity that implements racial bias to maintain the dominant order in place. Such an example speaks to the critical model of interpellation that is now being emptied of its juridical function precisely because the algorithm does not engage with any particular subject but with a set of quantified data that have been pre-empted upon the suspect. In the age of an algorithmic legal system, judges do not need the figure of the interpellated as they do not engage with any particular subject. What matters since the beginning of the 1990s is not so much the fact that ubiquitous computer-based images mimic the operations of living thought, but rather that networked machines are producing new messages that have political consequences, particularly for the making of subjectivities. The image of Big Data ideology is an operative image that structures relations to the material conditions of existence. Such an image is no longer anchored in the interpellation and positioning of a specific subject. On the contrary, the operative image of Big Data ideology is technical: it operates by fostering practices, such as behavioural profiling, financial tracking, displacement recording, the monitoring of bodily performance, and the capturing of data, that cannot be apprehended by the individual.62 In this context, the material procedures of the production of data and the mechanisms for the dissemination of 59 Noble 2018, p. 24. 60 Ibid., p. 27. 61 Ibid. 62 Dillet and Nony 2016, p. 26.

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information are not based on a model for equality. Instead, they operate under the cover of technological innovation and political neutrality to help maintain the dominant order based on discrimination. In the midst of theoretical debates concerning race in the digital age, the discursive model of interpellation should be repurposed to sustain a critique of racism in the biometric present. As a theoretical framework, the notion of interpellation is anchored in two distinct historical moments. The first is the interjection “Look, a nigger!” described in Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs.63 This interpellation imposed a verdict constituted in plain sight: it is through the gaze of the child who is talking to his mother that Fanon sees himself as bearing the mark of an incurable alterity. In this case, the interpellation functions based on an epidermic mode that both targets and positions the subject as other.64 This model of interpellation is still useful to account for the work of the gaze in positioning the other in a racialized category. However, an understanding of interpellation à la Fanon needs to be refashioned to understand the function of the automatic profiling, tracking, and capturing of racialized bodies in the digital age, as these operations are being performed out of sight. The development of automatic computing—self-managed computing systems with minimum human interference—has changed the governance of social and economic systems by displacing human agency. As seen with the software Northpointe, the automatic computing cancels out interpretation and short-circuits the possibility to address the subject of law. Within this mutation of the organizing ecology of media, “control becomes an automaton.”65 In this context, algorithms can imitate, replicate, terminate and become an automatic analyser of social relations.66 Data structure, performing out of sight, optimizes the algorithmic operations by providing a way of organizing subjectivities.67 In Big Data ideology, media is a form of performativity that becomes the condition for law.68 No need to interpret the situation; the subject is now being interpellated by an automatized network of data that dictate its position and potential culpability in the form of the law. Media is both a condition of possibility of law and law the condition of subjectivity in a context when the human is no longer the main agent of the media network in which he or she evolves, as media operate more and 63 64 65 66 67 68

Fanon 1952, p. 90. Macherey 2012, p. 13. Fuller and Goffey 2012, p. 76. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 100.

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more below the threshold of human sensory perception while structuring both the logic and control of society. The second moment is Louis Althusser’s interjection “Hey, you there!” developed in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (1970) to argue that ideology interpellates individuals as subjects.69 This interpellation is the theoretical framework Althusser proposed to argue that there is no ideology except for des sujets concrets (concrete subjects).70 In this case, the figure of the interpellation displays the function of ideology as that which unfolds the process of subjectivation. Ideology recruits its subject by interpellating individuals in a given society. The process of production and social reproduction becomes central to accounting for the material condition of ideology. However, in the case of computational racism, while the Althusserian model of interpellation has been important for analysing the allusion/illusion paradigm central to ideology, it does not account for the newly engendered language of data materiality and their operation of quantifiable abstraction. While a lot of emphasis is put on the transparency of communication in the network to reassure users of the efficacy of media works, the media-driven milieu in which we evolve is increasingly operating within an opaque and organizing structure of codes that no longer translate into identifiable signs.71 In the digital age, the material procedures of the production of data neither distinguish among nor select individuals; it does not provide a detailed understanding of the programmatization of the user either. On the contrary, media impose a grid of intelligibility that selects, dissects, and captures information to better feed the performative and opaque structures of a-signification.72 Much like the judges who outsource their interpretative competence to probability software, the ideology of Big Data does not need the figure of the interpellated as it does not engage with any subject at all. It produces subjectivities in the aftermath of a moment emptied of interpretation. Within the data driven landscape of today’s communication, the body turns into a quantifiable set of abstracts and predictions. In this context, biology has gone computational, and so has the sociodiscursive mode of bodily apprehension. The digital age is experiencing the emergence of particular forms of racial discrimination through the proliferation of devices that track, capture, and exploit embodied attention. Such an apparatus of control points to the deployment of a new regime 69 Althusser 1970, p. 46. 70 Ibid. 71 Nony 2021, p. 302. 72 Ibid., p. 303.

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of surveillance in which the state apparatus and its security policies are intrinsically linked to the business of the Big Data economy.73 At a time when most media operate below the threshold of human consciousness, the discursive formation of race-based subjecthood needs to be revaluated from the standpoint of the operations of governance in which algorithms play a central role. Moreover, the insidious instrumentalization of the racialized body in today’s data-driven governance has undergone systemic changes. This does not mean that media theorists have to reduce race discourses to an apolitical understanding of representation. On the contrary, much work needs to be done to unpack the racialized categories at play in the digital and account for the performative potential that such platforms offer for alternative modes of being in the world. In Feed-Forward, Mark Hansen engages in a discussion of the impact of digital media on our experience of time. He challenges the common assumption that we choose to engage with media and consume its content.74 On the contrary, he proposes thinking of media as an unavoidable part of our experience: it has expanded its scope to operate outside the realm of our perception. Media technics apply a prospective model of data mining to dig out specific information and instrumentalize time through the development of probabilities and their corollary experiments. In their respective works on the pre-emptive power of new media technology, Brian Massumi and Mark Hansen analyse the instrumentalization of time in today’s algorithmic modes of data surveillance and pre-crime policy. Working on post-September 11, American foreign policy and its logic of imminent threat, Massumi singles out the effective rather than the causal operative logic of pre-emption, where the virtual power of futurity is employed to quasi-causally affect the present.75 For Hansen, the “premediation” of future events prior to their occurrence—as exemplified in the film Minority Report—operates at the level of ideology. To Hansen, it is urgent to distinguish between “the future-implicating causal efficacy of the real and the premediation of how that efficacy might produce the future.”76 The latter is a representation that is designed to immunize the possibility of the improbable. Both the logic of pre-emptive power and premeditation are deployed as ontological problems that question how to relate to what has not yet emerged in the present and yet constitutes a pressing future threat. 73 74 75 76

Levin 2018. Hansen 2015, pp. 33–81. Massumi 2007, paragraph 23. Hansen in Grusin 2015, p. 132.

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Race as Chosification and Pre-Emption The global strategy of social conservatism aims to defend society against all threats. From one socio-political system to another, the definition of menace and violence not only varies but also carries the weight of the deployment of a particular apparatus of defence and attack. Expressions of the intent to hurt or indications of an impending danger are detected according to parameters whose characteristics can be as versatile as they are obscure. For racialized bodies and other social subjects that suffer the predicament of discrimination, to exist is to be prey in a system that often dissimulates its violence. As often seen in the case of police violence, the justification for the exercise of power is the supposed danger that racialized bodies could exercise. This a priori classification of being as threat becomes the alibi for the exercise of violence over the racialized body. The classification and sequencing of the human race into racist dichotomies does not only function as a juridical tool (as an alibi) it also performs a certain vector of consciousness, where the dominant category makes it habitual to see others as inferior.77 In today’s digital age, not only is the interpretation of danger based upon a targeted definition that suits a political agenda, but such a political hermeneutic is performed by algorithmic procedures that operate below the threshold of humans’ sensory-motor capacities. The consequence of this layer of operationality is clear: law, interpretation, and subjectivity production are now reconfigured to impose a regime of discrimination. The politics of the threat, or the politics that define threats as that which need to be combatted, has led to the emergence of war temporalities in which accessing future potential shapes the face of the present. For Rouvroy, such techniques of “prediction” aim to remove uncertainty, doubt, and hesitation by analysing large datasets. Rouvroy understands this change toward prediction as a “passage from the deductive logic to a purely inductive logic.”78 She develops the notion of “algorithmic governmentality” to update understandings of Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality. The aim of the Big Data ideology, she explains, is to remove uncertainty but also “recalcitrance.”79 Individuals, by becoming individuals, are also becoming “quantified sel[ves].” Since all their data are considered potentially useful, everything should be recorded and kept for future potential uses.80 77 Césaire 2000, p. 21. 78 Rouvroy and Stiegler 2016, p. 8. 79 Ibid., p. 9. 80 Ibid.

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The promise of the Big Data ideology is therefore a “passion for the real”: we can finally know the distances we walk, the calories we eat, and the hours we sleep without any interference or friction. We have direct access to new functionalities. What seemed previously incalculable is now calculated for us at the cost of our voluntary donation of data. This is a new kind of voluntary servitude. What was incalculable, improbable, and often abstract, such as desires and dreams, is now calculated and processed by these online services using sophisticated algorithms. In algorithmic governmentality, our expectations take into account the results from these online services about our possible future experiences (the colour of the food from that restaurant, the music from bands playing at that gig, etc.). This layer of operationality creates a veil that separates the subject from the real operations performing before him. As such, the ideology of Big Data is the ideology of an operational delay that separates the time of embodied experience from the time of the data extracted from subjectivities. The development of automatic computing prompts new forms of objectification for the body, making the latter become the field of a constant operation of data mining. Such an operation is profitable to the capitalist system of extraction and dispossession that inherently links together the problem of the labour force with the problem of colonialism81 and dispossession.82 Based on the chosification of subjectivities, this system fails to provide un droit des gens (a people’s right) as much as it is incapable of providing a moral for individuals.83 In other words, colonialism and capitalism are systems that occupy life. They imply a negotiation of life in order to control and modulate people’s modes of existence. In the wake of Rouvroy’s work, networked machines embody specific forms of power and authority, leading to statistical governance.84 This algorithmic governmentality produces a post-interpellative mode of governance that urges us to consider operations of bodily control and behavioural surveillance from an a-perceptive point of view. As Mireille Hildebrant points out, such governmentality is based on the development of techniques “that trace and correlate the data, detect patterns invisible to the naked eye, to recombine discrete data into new contexts and to anticipate futures on the basis of patterns found in past behavior.”85 At stake here is not only the instrumentalization of time for 81 82 83 84 85

Césaire 2000, p. 7. Chakravartty and Ferreira da Silva 2012, pp. 361–85. Ibid., p. 14. Rouvroy and Berns 2013, p. 164. Hildebrant 2011, pp. 141–60.

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the sake of programmability. The pre-emptive dimension of a computerdriven environment also questions the production of particular forms of subjectivity.

Conclusion What matters in the proliferation of video technology is not so much the fact that ubiquitous computer-based images mimic the operations of living thought, but rather that networked machines are producing a new image of thought that has political challenges, especially regarding racial discrimination. This new image is the one fostered by the ideology of Big Data, meaning that Big Data ideology operates by fostering practices of oppression out of sight. Since it is not anchored in the interpellation and positioning of a certain subject, this ideology operates on the capturing of data that have not yet been made intelligible for the subject. In this techno-political context, the models of interpellation (Fanon, Althusser) need to be revaluated in light of the model of pre-emption (Hansen, Massumi, Rouvroy) to reflect on the development of devices used to track and mine data out of the body. Racialized bodies succumb to premature death (Gilmore) because of the programmed life imposed upon them. This programmed life is anchored in the use and abuse of technology to serve multiple political agendas, including those of the Far-right as seen in the French National Front, where racism operates as a chosification of human being.86 In the age of Big Data ideology, the question of programmed life is intrinsic to the extraction of information and resources that operate out of sight, outside of the tangible realm of linguistic utterance. If autonomic computing is nothing but an “ideological vision,”87 as Rouvroy has stated, the digital plunges us into abyssal ontological and epistemological interrogations concerning our relation to the real. When people are used as tools, they become programmable, meaning that they can be apprehended through their potential actions. When discrete-state machines pre-empt future action, the virtual dimension of life is compromised, and the subject is constrained to adapt to a line of behaviour that has been formulated for him.88 Racialized technology in the age of Big Data ideology marks a shift from a model of subjectivation based on interpellation that operate as an 86 Césaire 2000, p. 23. 87 Rouvroy 2011, p. 134. 88 See Stiegler 2022.

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“epidermic level”89—one that enforces power through “injury”90—to a model of programmation where notions of history and agency are at stake. Because technologies produce the means through which events are transmitted in time and space, they shape the cultural knowledge of historical time. Following concerns over informational structures of domination, I would like to offer one last genealogy for thinking about the relation between culture, technology, and history. Such a genealogy engages technics without forgetting its constitutive surroundings. The so-often taken for granted and neutral value of technical objects is precisely where to locate the work of ideology today; a work that needs to be revaluated as new platforms of power (communicative, computational, capitalistic) are deployed.91 I understand that for some time the question of the discursive was embedded in a linear conception of informational exchange, preventing people from addressing a bigger picture, a newly formed world picture where ideological effects are intrinsically linked to the making of history as a hegemonic world order. Each historical period is determined by the technologies deployed to produce, secure, and transmit messages, thus perpetuating the informational structure that conditions the possibility of legitimizing certain narratives over others. Knowledge in relation to technology is based on a hierarchy that dictates the value of what gets to be preserved, archived, and erased to guide the informational trajectory of a society. As seen in what Boaventura de Sousa Santos called epistemicides, the destruction of knowledge “involves the destruction of the social practices and the disqualification of the social agents that operate according to such knowledges.”92 Such an informational trajectory is the constitutive narrative shaping historical time: both its past (as condition) and its future (as legitimation). As such, culture stands at the crossroads of history and technology. Culture is where a technology of history is cultivated to sustain or confront forms of dominance and structures of power. The culture at work in the relation between history and technology is produced by techno-epistemes, which are pivotal points in the informational structure of societies. Each techno-episteme creates a new set of codes that dictate the cultural function of a technical object. In this context, the discursive has to do with technical structures that produce the framework in which a certain knowledge of history is transmitted as discourse. The emergence of a technology, as well 89 90 91 92

Fanon 1952, p. 110. Butler 1999, p. 2. See Dean 2009; Lovink 2019. de Sousa Santos 2014, p. 153.

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as its imposition, creates techno-epistemes that rearrange the set of rules constitutive of the social structure of exchange. In other words, technoepistemes not only shape forms of knowledge by deciding which information is collected and shared, they are often deployed to dominate and erase previous forms of knowledge. Dominant forms of techno-epistemes thus sustain an asymmetrical structure between who informs, who receives, and who is used as forms of labour in the exchange. Forms of political address are invented each time the silencing structure of the techno-epistemes is concealed in the technical object. I locate this concealment in the so-often misplaced cultural understanding and appropriation of the handling of tools in society. In the context of the ideology of Big Data, one major challenge is to revaluate the work of the imagination regarding newly engendered discriminatory structures. To address race today, one needs to engage in the work of the imagination in relation to new technics and technology. The chapter ends by suggesting that the realm of imagination as deployed by Spinoza can be an example of a technics of thought that not only requires the body to perform but that emerges out of a decolonized body, free from a priori structures that mine its potential for being in the world. Seeking a digital structure that promotes the becoming of both psychic and social individuals, and that goes beyond the pre-emptive operations imposed upon the bodies of users, is a question of searching for different semantic and imaginative operations able to give us a new form of combative, collective, and emancipatory organization.

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Hansen, Mark B. N. Feed-Forward. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015a. Hansen, Mark B. N. “Our Predictive Condition; or, Prediction in the Wild.” In The Nonhuman Turn, edited by Richard Grusin, 101–37. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015b. Hildebrant, Mireille. “Autonomic and Autonomous ‘Thinking’: Preconditions for Criminal Accountability.” In Law, Human Agency and Autonomic Computing, edited by Antoinette Rouvroy and Mireille Hildebrant, 141–60. New York: Routledge, 2011. Keeling, Kara. The Witch’s Flight. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Kuntzel, Thierry. L’Art Français. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario. Exhibition catalogue, 1991. Kuntzel, Thierry. Title TK. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2006. Kuntzel, Thierry, and Anne-Marie Duguet. Thierry Kuntzel. Été/Hiver. Dunkerque: École d’art de Dunkerque. Exhibition catalogue, 1991. Kuntzel, Thierry, and Bill Viola. Deux Éternités Proches/ Two Close Eternities. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2010. Lambert, Léopold. États d’Urgence: Une histoire spatiale du continuum colonial français. Paris: Premiers Matins de Novembre, 2021. Levin, Sam. “Tech Firms Make Millions from Trump’s Anti-immigrant Agenda, Report Finds.” The Guardian, October 23, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/ us-news/2018/oct/23/silicon-valley-tech-f irms-making-money-trump-antiimmigrant-agenda-report. London, Barbara. “Projects 29: Thierry Kuntzel: The Museum of Modern Art,” New York, from June 28 to September 2, 1991. Exhibition catalogue. https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_339_300063025. pdf?_ga=2.58767211.735248013.1628340770-440378686.1624781204. Lovink, Geert. Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism. London: Pluto Press, 2019. Macherey, Pierre. “Figures of Interpellation in Althusser and Fanon.” Translated by Zachary Luke Fraser. Radical Philosophy 173 (2012): 9–20. https://www. radicalphilosophyarchive.com/issue-files/rp173_article1_macherey_interpellationinalthusserandfanon.pdf. Marriott, David. “On Racial Fetishism.” Qui Parle 18, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 215–48. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.18.2.215. Massumi, Brian. “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption.” Theory & Event 10, no. 2 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2007.0066. Murray, Tim. Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. The Museum of Modern Art. “Projects: Thierry Kuntzel.” Press release. June, 1991. https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_327594.pdf? ga=2.99177304.735248013.1628340770-440378686.1624781204.

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Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. London: Routledge, 2002. Noble, Safiya. Algorithms of Oppression. How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Nony, Anaïs. “Anxiety in the Society of Preemption: On Simondon and the Noopolitics of the Milieu.” La Deleuziana 6 (2017): 102–10. http://www.ladeleuziana.org/ wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Deleuziana6_102-110_Nony.pdf. Nony, Anaïs. “Technical-Image: Opaque Apparatus of Programmed Significance.” Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism, edited by Aaron Jaffe, Michael F. Miller and Rodrigo Martini, 202–4. New York: Bloosmburry, 2021. Nony, Anaïs. “Technology of Neo-Colonial Epistemes.” Philosophy Today 63, no. 3 (2019): 731–44. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday20191111292. Rouvroy, Antoinette. “Technology, Virtuality and Utopia: Governmentality in an Age of Automatic Computing.” In Law, Human Agency, and Automatic Computing: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology, edited by Mireille Hilderbrandt and Antoinette Rouvroy, 119–40. New York: Routledge, 2011. Rouvroy, Antoinette, and Bernard Stiegler. “The Digital Regime of Truth: From the Algorithmic Governmentality to a New Rule of Law.” Translated by Anaïs Nony and Benoît Dillet. La Deleuziana, no. 3 (2016): 6–29. http://www.ladeleuziana. org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Rouvroy-Stiegler_eng.pdf. Rouvroy, Antoinette, and Bernard Stiegler. “Le régime de vérité numérique. De la gouvernementalité algorithmique à un nouvel État de droit.” Socio 4 (2015): 113–40. http://www.crid.be/pdf/public/7711.pdf. Rouvroy, Antoinette, and Thomas Berns. “Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d’émancipation. Le disparate comme condition d’individuation par la relation?” Réseaux 1, no. 177 (2013): 163–96. https://doi.org/10.3917/res.177.0163. Spinoza, Benedict de. A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise. Translated by R. H. M. Elwes. Mineola: Dover, 2004. Sousa Santos, Boaventura de. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Milton Park: Routledge, 2014. Stiegler, Barbara. Adapt! On a New Political Imperative. Translated by Adam Hocker. New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. Sweeney, Latanya, and Joy Buolamwini. “Race, Technology and Algorithmic Bias.” YouTube video, 26:59, April 26, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6fUc5_ whX8. Wasson, Haidee. Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

4. Video and the Technological Milieu of Desire Abstract: This chapter foregrounds the presence of video technology in shaping the milieu where desire emerges. I interrogate the milieu we share with video technology to foreground an ecology of desiring, desired, and desirable relations to performative technology. Moving beyond the psychological model applied to video and its aesthetics of narcissism, this chapter looks at both dispersive and penetrating video images to account for the flesh in subversive ways. I do so by looking at an historical moment: the demolition of the last women’s jail in Paris portrayed in Nicole Croiset, Judy Blum, and Nil Yalter’s collective work La Roquette, prison de femmes from 1974, and by comparatively approaching two video installations: Mona Hatoum’s Corps étranger from 1994 and Thierry Kuntzel’s La Peau from 2007. Dispersive and penetrating modes of video existence foreground the necessity to think about desire in relation to the milieu where images, objects, and subjects cohabit. Keywords: desire, video, technology, Mona Hatoum, Nil Yalter, Thierry Kuntzel

Perhaps the work of art (the work art does) has never been anything other than life worked on, through, and by a certain intention. – Denise Ferreira da Silva 1

Desire beyond Narcissism The question of desire in relation to video technology is the question of the living together with technology. It is the question of living entities sharing 1

Ferreira da Silva 2015, p. 1.

Nony, A., Performative Images: A Philosophy of Video Art Technology in France. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463722827_ch04

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modes of existence with and within technological platforms of relation. What draws me to desire in this chapter is the performative dimension of image technology and its capacity to act on the milieu in which images are seen. Specifically, I am interested in the performative dimension of video images because in that dimension I see the power of technology to shape the psychic and collective environment we inhabit. In that context the psychological model applied to visual studies has been central to interrogating the relationship between video-image technology, intimacy, and identity. This psychological model, applied to video art, was introduced in Rosalind Krauss’s seminal article “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” in 1976. In the article, Krauss generalized the image of self-regard, namely narcissism, as “the condition of the entire genre.”2 Krauss highlighted the aesthetic function of the video monitor used as a mirror in Vito Acconci’s video tape Centers from 1971 where Acconci is “filming himself staring and pointing his index finger to the center of a television monitor, a gesture he sustains for the twenty minutes running time of the work.”3 For Krauss, the pointing of the finger and the use of the video screen as a mirror revealed the particular logic of the medium: one of narcissism. The mirror, she explains, is produced by the capacity of the video medium to record and retransmit at the same time, thus “producing instant feedback.”4 She calls such a feedback a “centering” and advocates for a “psychological model” to read video technology as the medium of narcissism.5 The “ego-libido” of video is best understood in relation to the feedback loop as centring and mirroring psychological mechanisms relating to the pursuit of the gratification of the ego. Krauss suggests that “Self-encapsulation—the body and psyche as its own surround—is everywhere to be found in the corpus of video art.”6 For Krauss, the “video’s real medium is a psychological situation, the very terms of which are to withdraw attention from an external object—an Other—and invest it in the Self.”7 This centring of the gaze facilitates new modes of engaging the visible and the invisible and recalls the definition of the medium itself, that middle element, or milieu, that links both internal and external realms of identification. Interestingly, Krauss argues that there are three phenomena within video art that run counter to what 2 Krauss 1976, p. 50. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., p. 52. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 53. 7 Ibid., p. 58.

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she has explained so far: tapes that criticizes the medium itself as seen in Richard Serra’s Boomerang (1974), tapes that destroy the psychological hold of the video mechanism as seen in Joan Jonas’s Vertical Roll (1972), and video installations that use video as painting or sculpture as seen in Peter Campus’s dor (1975).8 To these phenomena, I would like to add two more: first, a dispersive dimension where video cohabits with other media such as drawing, sound, and photography, as seen in La Roquette, prison de femmes (1974), and where video images disperse categories of identification, as seen in Thierry Kuntzel’s La Peau (2007), and second, a penetrating dimension of the camera as seen in Mona Hatoum’s Corp étranger (1994) where the inside of the flesh becomes the raw material of encounter. The models of dispersion and penetration presented in these video works offers a meditation on the senses valuable for rethinking the notion of desire beyond narcissism. Instead of focusing on “self-encapsulation” and the mirroring effect of video technology, I focus on the dispersive and penetrating dimensions of performative images: their capacity to disperse in space and penetrate intimate realms such as the inside of the flesh and the surface of the skin. I am interested in how artists and activists, such as Mona Hatoum, Thierry Kuntzel, Nil Yalter, Judy Blum, and Nicole Croiset engage the realm of desire in their artworks to produce provocative and often disturbing discourses concerning social norms. Their video productions, which span a forty-year period, address the question of desire (its condemnation, simulation, and disappearance) in relation to our technologically mediated experiences. While the psychological model is useful to situate the centring dimension of video understood as a mirror, it does not question desire as a vital operation that anchors the subject it its relational mode of being with technology. By focusing on desire, I engage the milieu where video objects share the space with other modes of existence, including the presence of viewers in space. I link together technological milieus, performative video images, and desire to open up, in the theoretical realm of media studies, the idea that our increasingly media-driven milieu is drastically shaping desiring and desired bodies in time and space. This chapter widens the question of space as discussed in chapter 2 to interrogate the technological milieu: the in-between, the surrounding, the space within, the blurry zone of the relational unknown often shaped by technological supports, including video and screen-based technology. Video installation art is taken both as a dispersive and penetrating modality to engage desire in relation to video technology. As such, I would like to think of the multimedia installation as 8

Ibid., p. 59.

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highlighting the power of images beyond stillness (as object or subject) to question the future of desire as reclaimed by collective spaces of creation. What interests me is to question desire beyond the conceptual paradigm of object and subject to centre the notion of milieu as a modality for reclaiming the collective dimension of desire. The meaning of desire in relation to the performative images of video technology is addressed in this chapter through one historical moment and one comparison. First, the historical moment of 1974 engages with the demolition of Paris’ last women’s jail, La Petite Roquette, and the concomitant publication of Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison) in 1975, and the multi-media installation La Roquette, prison de femmes by Nil Yalter, Judy Blum, and Nicole Croiset between 1974 and 1975. I see in this moment in time a confluence of both historical, theoretical, and aesthetic forces valuable for addressing the subversive power of multi-media images. By attending to La Roquette, prison de femmes and its use of both still images, drawings, and movingimage videos, and by placing them in dialogue with debates questioning the representation of daily life under prison sentencing, I investigate the rarely acknowledged relation between space, archive, and desire under incarceration. This 1974 date is a valuable landmark for thinking about the impact of video technology on societal and psychic modes of individuation. The year 1974 offers both a temporal distance (almost fifty years since the increased automation of surveillance technology) for thinking about the drastic changes produced by discrete-state machines on societies and an architectural anchor (the infamous Panopticon of Bentham’s model of subjectification). In the first half of the chapter, I emphasize the milieu of the installation space to question desire from within an historical, theoretical, spatial, and “technical ecology.”9 As such, I am inspired by the work of Léopold Lambert whose last book operates various comparisons to reveal the colonial continuity of France’s governance and its disciplinary implementation in its territories.10 In this chapter, I propose comparing a site (La Roquette), an installation (La Roquette, prison de femme), and an epistemological moment (the publication of Foucault’s landmark text) to reveal the work of technology in subversive modes of inhabiting space and producing desire for social change. Building on this first section, the chapter offers a comparison between the work of Mona Hatoum’s Corps étranger (Foreign Body) from 1994 and Thierry Kuntzel’s La Peau (The Skin) from 2007. The goal is to access the 9 Petit 2017, p. 15. 10 Lambert 2021, p. 47.

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various realms of bodily interactions produced by video as image and apparatus. This comparison allows me to focus on the skin, the epidermis, the tangible surface of encounter because in them I see the milieu from which to redefine the gaze in relation to desire. Much attention has been paid to desire as either an object to be possessed or as a figure to identify with. Less importance has been given to the space in which desire emerges: the spatial and temporal condition that create a milieu in which desire can individuate itself as a relational living entity. I see in the multimedia installation La Roquette, Hatoum’s use of the endoscopic camera, and Kuntzel’s use of skins the visual milieux paradigmatic of the artists’ engagement with the complexity of desire, the other, and the reflection of self-presentation. This second half of the chapter is an opportunity to engage the “psychological model” offered by Krauss. To do so, I enter into the technicity of these two installations to understand how they play with the layers of intimacy buried in the looping video, not so much as a mirror for narcissistic tendencies but as dispersive and penetrating function for creating new desiring and desirable modes of existence with technologies.

Images behind Bars, beyond Stillness To question desire is to question the drive to persevere in inventing a future that is wanted, needed, and that can also surpass the realm of the possible. This realm of the possible is harshly restrained in spaces of incarceration, which reminds me of the video, photograph, and drawing installation La Roquette, prison de femmes, co-created in 1974–1975 by Nil Yalter, Judy Blum, and Nicole Croiset. Based on the testimony of a former convict called Mimi, whose discourse forms the voice over of a black and white video, this collective creation reinforces the sociological style of intervention video with a hybridity of mediums. This hybridity creates a sensory accumulation as the spectator is invited to hear Mimi’s voice, read the texts written under the photographs, turn pages of a book, watch the video, look at drawings, and circulate within the space. Visualizing the space of desire, installing the time of an encounter, even if the latter is virtual, is the often-untold agenda of video installation art where the space of the installation becomes the realm of an unpredictable relation between the viewers and the artform. Not trapped in one explanation of the real, such a relation indulges in the passing of moments as building the possibility of a future to come. The installation is part of a series of work by video pioneer Nil Yalter, including the video tape Harem from 1979 and the critical guided tour of

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Paris seen through the eyes of two foreigners in the video tape Paris Ville Lumière from 1974 (see chapter 2). In these works, contemporary feminist artist Nil Yalter focuses on sexuality, body movements, and feminine spaces to reclaim narratives of women’s lives under patriarchal and capitalist regimes in post-WWII Europe. One interesting aspect of the work of Nil Yalter, and her feminist comrades who participated in the production of La Roquette, prison de femmes is that the installation art blurs the often-binary distinction made between activist videos and video art. Indeed, in the case of La Roquette, prison de femmes, the emphasis is on the location of the video production offering alternative narratives concerning life under carceral detention. While in cinema, the separation between fiction and documentary films has been criticized and is increasingly blurry, there is still a strong impetus toward the segregation of art from activist practices when it comes to video installation. This separation is probably due to the fact that activist practices of video are grounded in a collective effort, as seen in the multiple video groups that emerged in the 1970s France: Les Muses s’amusent, Les Insoumuses, Vidéo Out, Les Cent Fleurs, Vidéo 00, Slon Vidéo, and Vidéa. A collective impulse shaped this video work and made visible alternative and marginal narratives and histories, as seen in France Grève de femmes à Troyes (France Women’s Strike in Troyes) from 1971, which was co-directed by Cathy Bernheim, Ned Burgess, Catherine Deudon, Suzanne Fenn, Annette Lévy-Willard, and edited by Carole Roussopoulos. As collectives who centre collaboration over authorship, these activist/artistic video pioneers destabilized the category of art to foreground a combative culture of resistance.11 Instead of capturing audio-visual material without the possibility of post-shooting consent, the video emerged as a tool of alliances. As Ros Murray points out, the possibility of instant playback of the video recorders created a sense of trust between the person being taped and the director. The latter could simply show what had been recorded and ask for approval or modify the material before distributing it in a fixed format.12 Out of this technologically produced sense of immediacy and trust, the playback functioned as a safety modality that ensured a politics of belonging grounded in the respect of the person whose audio-visual presence was being recorded and thus captured, as seen in Roussopoulos’ Les Prostituées de Lyon parlent (The Prostitutes of Lyon Speak Out) from 1975. Roussopoulos interviewed prostitutes on strike who occupied a church in Saint-Nizier and broadcast 11 See Nony and Setai 2020. 12 See Murray 2016.

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their stories outside of the church using TV monitors. Now available in DVD format, this 46-minute colour video highlights the work of the video object in establishing trust between the interviewees. They were in full command of the footage and images kept and could decide what was going to be shared, broadcasted, and archived. In taking video as a tool for feminist activism, figures such as Carole Roussopoulos worked with the desire to encounter the other from a mutually safe space of exchange and freedom. La Roquette, prison de femmes coincides with the year Michel Foucault published Surveiller et punir: La naissance de la prison and the demolition of one of France’s most important women’s jails: La Petite Roquette. Located in the eleventh arrondissement of Paris, The Roquette was divided between two buildings built in 1830 by the architect Louis Hyppolyte Lebas and inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s structure of the Panopticon. For the first time in France, Bentham’s panoptic architecture was realized, directly inspired by the “Eastern State Penitentiary” in Philadelphia built in 1829.13 La Petite Roquette (the smallest of the two Roquette buildings, and the one used in La Roquette, prison de femmes) inaugurated the organization of incarceration as cellular imprisonment.14 The star-shaped building was first a juvenile detention centre (children as young as seven years old were detained there, and Jean Genet was incarcerated there at the age of fifteen). No detainees were allowed to communicate; food was served directly in the cell of each inmate; mass was received in one of the 276 individual compartments created in the chapel. La Petite Roquette was the main centre for the public execution of woman detainees in Paris. The last woman to be executed in La Petite Roquette was killed by guillotine in 1943. Sentenced by a tribunal under the pro-Nazi Pétain regime, Marie-Louise Giraud died for helping other women perform clandestine abortions during the war. While public executions were abolished in 1939, and while François Mitterrand officially promulgated the death penalty as unlawful in 1981, it was only in 2007 that the abolition entered the constitution of the French Republic. For the inaugural demolition of La Petite Roquette in 1974, the city of Paris organized an exhibition to give access to the structure, design, and registered history of the building. For the event, Nil Yalter, Judy Blum, and Nicole Croiset created the multi-media installation La Roquette, prison de femmes to portray the living conditions of women inmates. The collective creation was animated by the desire to archive the intimate exchanges performed under incarceration and reflect upon themes related to confinement and 13 See Guérin 2014. 14 Foucault 1975, p. 237.

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freedom.15 The installation centred peripheral details (such as the use of cigarettes to bargain for food or the same-sex relationships taking place in the bathrooms under the cover of the nuns’ gaze) to account for actions and emotions endured by incarcerated women. La Roquette, prison de femmes functions as a “docu-fiction”16 based on the stories of Mimi, a former inmate whose face is kept hidden. Mimi’s anecdotes become the raw material for the creation of this multi-media installation where each medium (drawing, video, photograph, writing) serves as an attempt to make the realities of daily life sharable outside the walls of the prison. The installation consists of thirty-two panels made of photographs and drawings by Nil Yalter and Judy Blum. These are accompanied by writings based on the experiences of Mimi and a video made by Nil Yalter and Nicole Croiset. There is a folder that is made up of other drawings, photographs, and the complete translation into English of Mimi’s testimony. The video captures images of the only wall of La Roquette not to be destroyed. Mimi recorded her témoignage (testimony) directly to a tape recorder and her voice was used as a voice over for the video, edited by the feminist collective Vidéa and screened on a TV monitor.17 The installation La Roquette, prison de femmes offers a few insights into how to conceive the other lives of the image in relation to multi-media space and desire. Made of drawings, texts, video images, and photographs in the female prison, it creates an invitation to circulate in space. As a viewer, you enter the space of a gallery divided symmetrically by a monitor playing black and white video images. On your left-hand side, sixteen photographs are framed, creating a fragmented square shape of various black and white visuals. Below each photograph, a first-person script is handwritten in English. The text occupies the bottom of the frame and tells the stories of daily gestures in the prison. Stories made of boredom and surveillance, solitude and desire, restriction and forced labour. On the right-hand side of the monitor, sixteen drawings display scenes of everyday social and private life under incarceration: discussions shared on a bed, extra portions of meals handed over a communal table, and nuns discretely closing their eyes to the sexual activities occurring during shower times. Each of the sixteen drawings is accompanied by a handwritten text in French. Anecdotes and citations guide the visitor inside the daily life of a women’s prison. At the centre stands a book of photographs in front of the video monitor. The book 15 Dumont 2016, p. 7. 16 See Gratza 2015. 17 See Dumont 2016.

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offers another medium to grasp the narratives presented in the installation. Texts, drawings, moving images, and photographs all cohere in space to shape the narrative of women’s lives behind the bars. Back at the centre of the installation, the monitor screens a twenty-four-minute-long video: slow motion of female hands stroking towels, a card box set on fire, arms reaching from one side to the other, a wall in the background. Anonymous figures perform in front of the wall of the jail: legs crossing, hands stroking, mouths talking become sensuous invitations to access women’s gestures of sociality under prison conditions. Two main features characterize the moving image presented: the wall of the jail functions as a continuous visual background, while the voice over of former detainee Mimi functions as a guiding narrative. As a body within the installation, you negotiate your own circulation within the space while the various mediums presented in it shape your understanding of incarcerated sociality. Through La Roquette, prison de femmes, the feminist collective created an installation where the gestures performed behind the bars of the prison and the viewers circulating in the space of the exhibition formed a space of encounter: a new condition of signification. The multi-media dimension of the installation allows for the superposition of images as much as it allows for the superposition of narratives and anecdotes to reclaim a collective zone of both social and psychic intelligibility. The use of hand-drawn visuals, written notes, and mechanically produced images and sounds, as seen in photographs and the video tape, produce a sensory realm where multiple modalities of engaging with testimony, archive, and history are offered to the viewer. Instead of a linear, one-dimensional story, this collective work creates a sensory encounter between the voice, the image, and the text in the installation space. The viewer, who is constantly negotiating the presence of his or her walking/moving body, the presence of other viewers, and the materials presented to them, activates the space by engaging in a singular process of selecting what to look at, listen to, and read about. In such an installation, the emphasis is on the connection, the links, and the signification that emerges in the milieu. A central feature of this installation art is the relational modality of creating knowledge in the space of encounter between multiple media and the presence of another unknown viewer. Mainly informed by artists reflecting on the post-independence period, workers’ rights movements, and feminist practices of social justice, the reclaiming of a multisensorial space has to do with the desire for new creative forms of knowledge to emerge: specifically, the issue of photographs shown in art galleries with special attention to stillness and movement as categories

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to rethink and engage desire. “Still images” have been widely debated in the field of media studies, with scholars such as Susan Sontag arguing that photographs help possess the past since the medium makes reality survive in material forms. As “the registering of an emanation,”18 photographs are not simply images but reflections of light capturing a moment. This idea of registering and thus tracing a mark in time is of concern for philosopher Vilém Flusser who offers the notion of the “technical image” to investigate the cultural shift in our modality of relating to the real imposed by the industrial revolution. For Flusser, technical images such as photographs function as “metacode of text”19 representing the last stage of a cultural revolution that started with the alphabet. Not only do image and text constitute two essential codes of cultural history, but technical images are also surfaces that depart from a mimetic representation of the real to inscribe codes and concepts as connotative forms of signification.20 Stillness, as a register or as a code, is also a central category in Roland Barthes’s reflection on photography. Much like the “self-encapsulation” pertaining to video’s centring effect in Krauss’ argument concerning the narcissistic aesthetic of video art, Barthes’s punctum is an anchor for the gaze, a pillar that drives the viewer to see and grasp the message inscribed in the image.21 Register, code, and punctum, however important as categories for the writing of history and central to debates on the archive in relation to photography, do not adequately address the other lives of the image when photographs share the space with other media, such as drawings and videos, in museum galleries. In the relational modality of creating knowledge, the static categories presented above (register, code, and punctum) need to be invented anew to account for the associative, relational, and undetermined modality of multi-media encounters. In other words, I am interested in how different types of medium (drawings, photographs, writings, video images) help us access various realms of interpretative reality and how such an access offers an alternative narrative on liveliness, desire, and futurity. The paradigm of movement and stillness questions the “other lives of the image” when photographs are seen in the presence of other media such as writings, drawings, and videos in the museum gallery.22 Furthermore, the video presented in La Roquette, prison de femmes shows the wall of the jail 18 Sontag 1977, p. 154. 19 Flusser 2011, p. 15. 20 Ibid., p. 27. 21 See Barthes 1981. 22 I would like to thank Patricia Hayes, Iona Gilburt, and the participants of the “Other Lives of the Image: International Workshop in Visual History and Theory” organized at the Center

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and presents the twenty-four-minute-long testimony of Mimi who was under twenty-one years old when she was sent to La Roquette and who explains how she experienced her time inside the walls of the prison. She describes for example how inmates played “yo-yo” and attached messages to a rope that vacillated outside their window until it reached the right person. She also explains how they worked and made keychains that only paid for cigarettes. Most inmates worked and were paid eighty cents to produce a keychain. When they worked fast, some inmates could make up to 200 keychains a day. Only inmates who had received their sentence were forced into labour. No hygiene products were given to them. They cantinent (to trade in the prison’s cafeteria) toilet paper, hygiene products, cigarettes, letters, pens, and wool, and even food and newspapers. The newspapers were used for the images provided with recipes. Inmates would cut out images of food, for instance a salad, and eat them. They were given a lot of carbohydrates and Mimi gained eight kilograms in two and a half months. Halfway through the video, we see the bottom half of Mimi’s face. We see her mouth talking and smiling but we cannot hear what she says; she is muted. The video returns to the wall, which is used as a fixed background. We see two arms coming from each side of the video frame; one of them is giving a piece of clothing to the other extending its reach to grab what looks like a robe used by inmates. The camera gradually zooms in while we see a hand extending a plate with a spoon in it. When the plate is at the centre of the frame, a second hand appears from the right side of the screen and delicately takes the plate, which then slowly disappears. Following the same gesture, we see arms offering a blanket, a pitcher, a cigarette. The video returns to Mimi’s voice over while we look at pictures of a woman (with long hair, in a pair of jeans, smoking a cigarette outside). Mimi is recalling memories of the first lice outbreak and describes the sanitary measures that were put in place. We see two hands delicately tearing up a photograph of a meal in a magazine. Mimi’s outrage concerning the treatment inflicted on her and the inmates is juxtaposed to a video recording of a woman eating an image of food from a magazine. When Mimi recalls the sanitary conditions (her body but also the space of the jail), we see the same woman who ate the magazine images in the previous sequence putting make up on her eyes, extracting used cigarettes from an ashtray and opening them to save some of the tobacco left. In the meantime, the voice over explains that inmates were not allowed to know what was going for Humanities Research, University of the Western on October 3 and 4, 2019, where part of this chapter was first presented.

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on outside the prison; the radio was turned off when the news started. A monthly television time was allowed but that only happened when the tv monitor was actually working. In another sequence, we hear Mimi explaining how she traded cigarettes for an extra dessert, or asked for extra books from inmates who were not that interested in reading. These testimonies are juxtaposed against the engraving of a heart on a piece of cardboard followed by the reproduction of the symbol on a piece of paper with a pencil. We then see another sequence where pen ink is mixed with ash and water. We see the woman using this technique to make a stick and poke a tattoo on her left hand. Only then, Mimi’s voice finally coincides with the images presented. She explains that the inmates used two needles, one to stick in the skin and the other to serve as an ink reservoir. Three dotes signified mort aux vaches (down with the pigs) and five dotes signifies seule entre quatre murs (alone within four walls). The video of La Roquette, prison de femmes offers a double interrogation on the milieu of presence and desire in the installation and under incarceration. One aspect of such a question has to do with multi-media spaces and the kind of mediality they produce when images are presented via a different medium. The other aspect has to do with desire and the realm in which social desire is shared and processed in time and space. Specifically, the multimedia installation focused on simple daily gestures (such as scooping food out of a bowl and folding blankets) to ponder the desire that these movements capture and how such desire translates in different contexts, through different media. This shared space of mediality could be named a milieu associé (associated milieu), which Gilbert Simondon def ines as the mediator of a relation between the technical and natural milieu.23 In Simondon’s philosophy, the associated milieu is that which establishes a link between natural elements and technically produced ones, and it is within that link that a technical being can function according to both invention and creation. In other words, the associated milieu is understood as the condition for the existence of the invented technical object. 24 For Simondon, technical objects are viable entities only if associated to a milieu that allows for the exploration of their open technicity. A technical object “stuck” in a milieu that does not encourage the concretization of its technical potential is a dead object reduced to use value. For Simondon, an associated milieu becomes a condition of emancipation, innovation, and invention. As a condition for the inventive 23 Simondon 1989, p. 57. 24 Ibid.

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and creative dimension to be deployed, the associated milieu offers another way of understanding the shared spatio-temporal relation that can be established between different elements. He calls such a condition “un conditionnement du présent par l’avenir, par ce qui n’est pas encore” (“a conditioning of the present reality of the technical object through that which is not there yet”). 25 This condition through the future, through that which does not exist yet, is the function of becoming that requires a capacity to organize various elements that can have une valeur d’ensemble (a value of togetherness). The value of togetherness is central to the notion of an assoctiated milieu where becoming takes place. The opposite of an associated milieu, what could be called a dissociated milieu, is a discretized space where both technical and natural elements are placed according to an undeployed and restricted potential. A dissociated milieu is one that conditions the use of a technical object instead of fostering its unrestricted, innovative potential. The use value rules as a function of the dissociated milieu, while the future is deployed as a condition of emancipation in the associated milieu. More importantly perhaps, for Simondon, the unity (the value of togetherness) of the associated milieu is analogous to the unity of living. It is an interrelated field of informational exchange and communicative relation (see chapter 2). The value of togetherness as unity is fostered according to a certain coherence of the schemes (be they mental, social, technical) that are deployed. If the schemes are in contradiction to one another, they do not form a unity; they simply confront each other and thus reduce each other’s potentiality.26 In the case of the video installation La Roquette, prison de femmes the various objects presented (drawings, photographs of everyday objects, archival documents, newspapers, a video monitor) are associated with other non-fabricated elements, such as the visitor and his or her movement in space. The collective installation La Roquette, prison de femmes creates an associated milieu where the value of togetherness, the unity of various media in space, allows for a clear understanding of the relations between the various spatial realms: the jail, the outdoor street where the video is shot, and the museum. In that space, visitors created their own spatial negotiation while engaging with the topical subject of confinement and incarceration. In other words, the “play on materials, sounds, images, and between the everyday” is associated with the space of universities, regional cultural centres, and feminist events where La Roquette, prison de femmes was often 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., p. 58.

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presented.27 In the context of the 1970s, which marked the struggle for the abolition of the penitentiary system in France, such an installation reveals other discourses, including lesbian sexuality and daily rituals in captivity. The development of the use of video technology in the 1970s and 1980s coincides directly with the era of both decisive feminist arguments around the issue of the labour force and radical critiques of gender politics. These debates, influenced by the rereading of Marx, the women’s liberation movement, and the rise of subaltern critiques of oppression opened up the terrain to engage again in the question of desire in relation to new means of production. The technical object of video offered a means through which to access different spatial realms and interrogate the carceral environment from within the intimate space of the relation between women inmates. At stake was the possibility of finding a way to engage with desire outside of the capitalist dichotomies of an object to be possessed and a subject to be identified.28 Instead, La Roquette offers a space to create and invent a new mode of relating to desire and the value of togetherness within an associated milieu. To a certain extent, La Roquette addresses these challenges of desire within the context of women’s incarceration in a radical and intersectional way. If we make room in our examination of desire for technology, information, and social relations, the questions of the grammar of the sensible and the ecology of milieu multiply exponentially. The radical examination of desire in the context of our increasingly moving-image environment grew out of a feminist reflection against the primacy of the white-male gaze in cinema, which prompted a critique of the dominant epistemologies of culture and identity. In addition, writers including Jonathan Beller, Kara Keeling, Ruha Benjamin, and Joy Buolamwini have taken up the critique of white-male gaze supremacy to dismantle the oppressive model of representation that continues to dictate the signifying realm of image-making technology. In France, the activist and artistic confrontations with hegemonic practices of representation was aided in the art world by the formation of various political groups throughout the ’60s and the ’70s such as CollectifVidéo, Vidéo-Info, Vidéo Out, Vidéo 00, Les Cents Fleurs, VidéoDéba, Liaisons Nouvelles, and women-only groups such as Inform’elles, Vidéa, M’Sam, Insoumuses, and Vidéoteuses. As Mignot-Lefebvre highlights, “Around 1975, it [video] became a real myth, comparable in magnitude to the current phenomenon of free radio, and in fact poses the same challenges: questioning of centralized 27 Dumont 2019, p. 183. 28 Deleuze and Guatarri 1983.

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information devices (major press and television especially), rights of citizens’ response to the media, the right to expression for all and in particular for sexual, ethnic and political minorities, the right of a majority, women, to come out of the silence and to speak freely about their body, their identity, of their struggles.”29 La Roquette, prison de femmes informs the life of women inmates and their carceral environment while innovating the ways in which the body can be presented and interrogated through video art. Following these debates around confrontation and expression, the insoluble problem of technology, information, and social relations lies in the contradictory benefits and dangers of desire in our capitalist society where the distinction between subject and object have vanished into realms of unsubtle distinction. Even if we momentarily isolate the debate on feminism and minorities from other battles over the nature of technology, the issue becomes only slightly more manageable. Posthumanist theorists, for example, have drawn attention to the limits of the realm of the human in its encounter with increasingly pervasive media technologies. As a result, many media artists turned toward the digital as another realm in which the human can be explored, investigated, and questioned. The debate that I have sketched here is, however, only a schematic for the much more intricate relation between the corporeal and the technical, which only gives rise to more questions. It is well beyond the scope of this project to attempt a detailed and accurate summary of all the theoretical and artistic responses to technology and desire. My point is rather that video artists on all sides of the debate are compelled to address the contradictions mandated by the evolution of technologies; a fact made evident by at least two important books on the subject: Yvonne Spielmann’s Video: The Reflexive Medium (2008) and Steve Nixon’s Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (2007). These books testify to the engagement of video artists in interrogating the realm of the electronic image to further add to the debate concerning the relationship between technology and aesthetics, and, furthermore, the increasingly artificial environment in which human and technical objects co-evolve. They take up the categories of the performative and the reflexive to engage in the power of the moving image to mix up our sensory-motor condition and to act in the realm of our social interactions. In the context of an increasingly mediated and information-based world, I find Simondon’s notion of the associated milieu valuable to further interrogate such an artificial environment. Because the goal was rarely to fictionalize reality but 29 Mignot-Lefebvre 1979, p. 91.

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on the contrary to access it from a multiplicity of images, video presented itself as a technical object open to innovative becoming. As such, video as a technical object is used to deploy a more innovative and thus combative dimension to moving-image technology; one that helps rethink the unity of togetherness as value.

Of Undifferentiated Skin and Flesh Togetherness and the associated milieu of desire found a point of encounter in the skin: the very surface of the flesh. And so it almost ends with the last piece. La Peau (The Skin) was presented in 2007; the year Thierry Kuntzel passed away. Made of digitally recorded moving images of skins shot in close up, the artist created his own homage to the layers of moving-image making. For this installation, Kuntzel used a 70-millimetre projector, which projects the roll horizontally as opposed to vertically. Inspired by a projector he saw in an exhibit at the Centre Pompidou that brings the moving image back to the wide format of early cinema, Kuntzel asked to borrow it. In La Peau, the screen appears on a large wall where the images are projected horizontally. The filmstrip has no frame (it is not separated into distinct photographs). Rather, the film is made of a long digitally produced image transferred back to the strip. The movement of the images passing through the projector mimics the movement displayed on screen. Like a long wall of animated skins, the film presented in this installation becomes a mural where epidermis, shape, scares, and colours melt into flesh. The installation La Peau functions as a homage to cinema and its filmic apparatus. In Kuntzel’s last creation, the micro-element of the skin becomes the material for the visual experience, creating an environmental texture that recalls what film scholar Laura Marks calls the skin of film.30 The movement of the projected moving image coincides with the movement of the défilement (scrolling) on the screen. This horizontal défilement produces what Kuntzel called l’émouvoir (move): a word in French that condenses the idea of the movement of the filmstrip into film-projection, and of the spectator who is moved by the filmic experience.31 As a film-skin, the screen was for Kuntzel always the question of a tangible encounter. He thought the moving image together with its screen as a “contact-zone”32 from which 30 See Marks 2000. 31 Kuntzel 1977, p. 57 32 Kuntzel 2006, p. 483.

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to explore the passing of time; the making possible of a shared experience where traces could freely appear and disappear in front of one’s eye. In La Peau, the skin and the screen become one through the vertical movement of the film whose organic quality varies from reddish pink to dark silver brown. Each scare, layer, fold, and shape gives form to an epidermis whose border is indistinguishable. Rather than separating figures, La Peau paints the skin together to form a collective landscape of unorganized matter. When the collective figure exists within the realm of perception, another space of desire can be deployed. I am convinced that the skin, as a newly engendered texture brought about by video, owes its force to the intimacy it reveals while making it impossible for the viewer to identify with one specific figure. There is no narration outside of the material quality of the image. The exploratory dimension of the artwork thus offers a realm that cannot be reduced to one dominant entity. The unity of the skin and the film strip creates an associated milieu when the undeferential flesh of the body is portrayed as possible encounter.33 “Skin-f ilm; who will know if what is seen on screen is an epidermal irregularity (scars, pigmentation…) or film-matter (deterioration, dust, scratch…), represented or representing?”34 This quote is emblematic of Kuntzel’s attempt to play with the signifying forces that shape image objects. At first, it reads as an engagement with the legacy of Saussure and the linguistic turn that developed around the question of the signifier and the signified. Yet, the performative space of the screen and its peculiar mode of presentation is not the one of writing. Like Matisse, by whose painting he was strongly influenced, Kuntzel claims that colours, shapes, and lights, which are always approached only through disciplinary separation and difference, are themselves vibrations of intensities that are constantly in exchange and resonance. Impressionism was a means through which to access the fluctuation of the soul and the visions it gives to access reality. As such, the skin as the landscape becomes the intimate space from which to express the possibility of a singular way of sensing. Thierry Kuntzel’s work encourages me to believe that, while white-gaze supremacy is a highly problematic aspect of filmic representation, the technical object of the video, and its discrete use as a digital technology in La Peau, allows us to move away from the realm of the symbolic to indulge in a more reflective modality concerning the audience relation to screens and the looping mechanism of moving-image presentation. In La Peau, there is no specific 33 Nony 2017, pp. 187–94. 34 Kuntzel cited in Kuntzel and Viola 2010, p. 29.

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space of production of meaning—a dedicated omniscient point of view—as visitors negotiate their own movement in space as opposed to being assigned a fixed seat in the cinema (see introduction). Moreover, the projection of the film strip is not based on the concealment of the projector since the latter is placed at the centre of the installation. Finally, there is no filmstrip that produces an effect that cannot be detected. While La Peau is an homage to cinema (the film, the black box and its projector) it also marks the end of the fiction of movement embodied in the cinematic apparatus. There is no twenty-four images per second mimicking movement anymore, only the slow défilement of the film that precisely projects its rhythm onto the screen. Contrary to the psychological model developed by Krauss, the looping mechanisms in La Peau are important when integrated into a wider reflection on the associated milieu where such a technology is deployed. I see in the feedback loop less a tribute to the psychological mechanism of the mirror, than a modality for questioning the correlated system at play when technology engages other forms of mediality in space. La Peau informs the possibility of using the technical object of the video projector in an innovative way where the movement of images and the movement in space shape the possibility of an embodied encounter. In “Le défilement: A View in Close Up,” Thierry Kuntzel did not approach the relation between “stillness-separation/continuity-mobility” from the perspective of the significance of the photogram and its effect of presence and opaqueness.35 Kuntzel did not want cinema to have two bodies; he wanted to move away from the inherent separation between the film (as the movie projected on the screen) and the film (as the material constituent of the film as in the film-strip).36 The defilement (the unrolling of the image) became both the conceptual and technical impetus for engaging in a moving-image presentation that installs, structures, and codes continuity. The skin as matter and as a fold ends up admitting its flaws, that is to say its orifices, where penetration is possible towards the inside, the intimate, the depth. Video, as a surface image and a penetrating device, played a very active part in the work of the artists. The scopic drive which pushes to see always closer, always further, is at the origin of recording of acts of penetration (the image represents them), but pushes to also invent endoscopy in the medical field, that is to say the means of achieving (the image is) the penetration of a video gaze inside the body.37 35 Kuntzel 1977, p. 51. 36 Ibid. 37 Parfait 2001, p. 210.

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Here perception and sensation are to be distinguished, and Gilles Deleuze, who attended Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s seminar on expression and sensation, offers insightful ways in which to question the becoming figure-like of the trace. In Kuntzel’s work, however, the trace is iterated only via the implementation of new temporalities. Understanding how Kuntzel successfully and at times problematically negotiated the intellectual legacy of the textual in his work depends directly on one’s recognition of the technicity of his work. By going back to the body a new form of desire is explored that is grounded in the space of the encounter with this potential landscape of investment. Kuntzel certainly did not decide to end his legacy on the skin; the theme itself is part of a larger attempt to invite different ways of experiencing bodily variation. The touch, the feel, the gaze are action nouns that are used to explore different ways of belonging to others and oneself in space. The spatial quality of La Peau is about finding a means to connect: to reassemble in the moving image something of the moving presentation of desire itself, one that morphs into different stages and colours. Kuntzel’s use of skins as a landscape to be explored for its singularities is an open invitation to redefine the way we engage with the notion of identity at a granular scale.

Confronting Liminality The skin as landscape and the associated milieu of the installation La Peau have informed the possibility of creating value through new temporalities. Quite different from Kuntzel’s artistic and intellectual universe, Mona Hatoum’s work bears the imprint of postructuralism’s most fundamental conflict: namely, the tendency to refuse to deal with form and yet embrace a sort of idealism for the material structure of thoughts. Yet, the stakes were higher for her than for Kuntzel because of the drastic transformation of the realm of mediation imposed by geopolitical conflicts: she is Palestinian, born in Lebanon, and was forced into exile when the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975. She is also directly impacted by the rise of new media technologies that influenced communication, cultural translation, and the possibility to sustain a relation to her loved ones from afar. In her 1988 video work Measures of Distance, the artist addresses her experience of cultural displacement, disorientation, and the sense of loss brought about due to war. For this fifteen-minute-long video tape, Hatoum uses the voice of her mother, nude pictures of her taken by Hatoum, the letters her mother wrote to her when Hatoum was in exile, and moving images she recorded when she

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visited her mother after over a decade long absence due to political unrest in Lebanon. The tape becomes an audio-visual system of layers assembled to produce a reflection on distance and clothedness, body language, and love. The letters that appear on the screen are written in Arabic and are translated and read out loud by Hatoum. The artist becomes her mother’s voice, recalling moments from the past that are now present on tape, such as the presence of her father, and creating a sense of collapse in the sender/ receiver paradigm of communication. Rather than deconstructing an ontological realm based on the primacy of the subject, she offers video-work as a locus from which to interrogate the mediated transformation of our relation to femininity and lineage, revealing through moving images the paradoxical and yet fruitful operation of new media technologies together with the relations one necessarily cultivates through taboos and conflicts. One specific video installation assumes particular significance for my argument concerning the associated milieu of desire and technology. In Corps étrangers, Hatoum uses endoscopic footage of her body, revealing the interior of her body and placing it on the floor of the video installation. This installation, presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1994, is composed of a tall cylindrical white structure accessible to the viewer, a video projector, a thirty-minute colour tape, and a sound system. Inside the cylinder, the images of Hatoum’s organs are projected on the floor, taking the audience into a secret and intimate space where that which is hidden is made visible and public. “To see the inside of the artist’s body is to see undifferentiated flesh while reflecting on the unknown and thus the strangeness of these visuals. This strangeness of the image, which presents the body as foreign to us—the title indicates it—offers a new, disturbing and absolutely fascinating image because it documents a part of the body which, in general, remains conscious only through pain, or feelings internalized as mental images. […] This increased visibility does not however reduce the existence of the body as opacity, enigma and resistance: our own body continues to elude us despite the disproportionate efforts of control made by les industries du ‘vivant’ (industries of the ‘living’).”38 In using the inside of her body as the material for her installation, Hatoum creates a parallel between the real, which is perceived through the human gaze, and the internal world of living organs and flesh, which cannot be grasped without a technological supplement. Furthermore, Hatoum offers us the possibility of seeing a body that is foreign to us while showing the inherently and equally vulnerable dimension of human beings who all look alike from the inside. 38 Ibid., pp. 212–13.

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To the narcissistic “self-encapsulating” dimension of video, as explored by Krauss, Hatoum’s Corps étranger responds in the form of an inverse selfportrait: a transgression that calls into question the narcissistic dimension of the video genre. “Mona Hatoum indulges and delivers to the spectator an unprecedented bodily transgression: approaching the inside of her body like a strange and foreign space, which she projects on the ground so that the spectator is engaged directly by treading this ground/screen, she literally realizes an interior self-portrait.”39 While Hatoum brings the inside of her body onto the floor of the museum space, she also brings the museum into thinking about the embodied experience that a specific cultural milieu produces in the viewer. In an interview with Janine Antoni from BOMB Magazine, Hatoum engages in the intention behind the making of Corps étranger: Mona Hatoum: The video was shot with the help of a doctor using an endoscopic camera. It didn’t hurt at all. I was given a drug that seemed to dull the pain, but I remained completely conscious, and as my insides were being filmed—I was directing the video at the same time. I called it Corps étranger, which means “foreign body,” because the camera is in a sense this alien device introduced from the outside. Also it is about how we are close to our body, and yet it is a foreign territory which could, for instance, be consumed by disease long before we become aware of it. The “foreign body” also refers literally to the body of a foreigner. It is a complex work. It is both fascinating to follow the journey of the camera and quite disturbing. On one hand you have the body of a woman projected onto the floor. You can walk all over it. It’s debased, deconstructed, objectified. On the other hand it’s the fearsome body of the woman as a constructed body. Janine Antoni: It also swallows you. You go into the body, both the image but also the installation. MH: Precisely. You enter a cylinder and you stand on the perimeter of the circular video image projected on the floor. You feel like you are at the edge of an abyss that threatens to engulf you. It activates all sorts of fears and insecurities about the devouring womb, the vagina dentata, the castration complex. JA: In the end, was it important that it was your body? MH: It had to be my body. JA: In a weird way it’s a kind of offering. It’s an exposure. Did you feel invaded in any way? 39 Van Assche in Archer, Michael, Guy Brett, and Catherine De Zegher 1997, p. 18.

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MH: I wanted the work to be about the body probed, invaded, violated, deconstructed, by the scientific eye. But when we were filming I was too concerned about getting the right images for my video to connect personally with any of these feelings. 40

Hatoum plays between the physical space of the institution and the liveliness of her organs, creating an associated milieu that deconstructs categories of understanding based on dichotomies such as inside/outside and self/ other. The institutional space of the museum is an artificial space that is designed to induce specific emotions, affects, and cultural effects in the viewer. The images of Hatoum’s body, and specifically the inverted self-portrait she offers, contrast with the architecture of the installation. Her inside is raw, alive, made of a singular rhythm solely dictated by her heart and organs. She has no agency; there is only the living agencement of her body, the medical camera, and the space of projection. She offers a reflection on the exchange of energy between her living body, the projected images of her body on the floor of the installation space, and the viewers who are encouraged to walk on top of her very insides. Mona Hatoum’s Corps étranger, offers what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls an “art of confrontation,” when reflecting on Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh’s thirty-three-minute event titled On Violence that functions as a public lecture and a performance where the artist confronts her audience with the violence of representation and universalist appropriations of knowledge. For Ferreira da Silva, the art of confrontation is “an anticolonial intervention precisely because it turns the space between the performer [in Hatoum’s case, her flesh projected on the floor for the visitor to walk on] and the audience into the trenches. By staging a confrontation, it forges an aesthetic experience that recalls and exposes art’s own performance of the violence that is modern thought, precisely because of the in/difference between the stage and the museum as exhibition sites.”41 By refusing to show images of her body that are easily identifiable, Hatoum confronts her viewers with a penetrating image that infiltrates the intimate realm of embodied experience. Corp étranger creates a liminal space of encounter between flesh, organ, and skin. It also creates an associated milieu between image, technology, and the sound that emanates from Hatoum’s body. For the installation, the sound is either coming from the breathing of the artist when the camera is outside her body or from her heartbeat when the camera is inside her vagina 40 Antoni 1998, pp. 60–61. 41 Ferreira da Silva 2015, p. 6.

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or her anus. To the very familiar rhythm of the breathing, one so familiar that is often goes unnoticed, is superposed another subtle one: the pulsation coming from within. These two rhythms operate together to create a sonic landscape that shapes the scopic experience of the images presented on the floor. Hatoum’s body image is thus presented as both surface and as antre (den). There is the familiar image of the body—the one that operates as a psychic representation to serve the narcissist drive of the ego—and the other that functions as a sensitive and yet unknown inside where the body is presented from within. The camera becomes both a foreign body inside the body of the artist, and the images captured create a foreignness to the commonly perceived image of the body. The camera becomes a penetrating intruder—a corps étranger—that provokes strangeness precisely because its presence requests a form of hospitality and attunement to its singular presence.42 This dual layer of understanding the camera in relation to the body and the images projected on the floor of the installation creates a sense of estrangement. This estrangement is linked to the transgression performed by the artist who is choosing a penetrating modality of image making. In the case of the endoscopic footage, the electronic objectivity of the image functions like an unknown order of reality that the viewer is now invited to perceive: “Le corps est mise en scène en tant que matière d’une substituition symbolique” (“The body is staged as the matter of a symbolic substitution”).43 Such a symbolic substitution functions because the often necessary coherence between image and body no longer f ind ground in the imaginary structure of the subject, now confronted by images of its body that are unknown. This new order of reality is not the one of narcissism; it does not function like a regular mirror where the viewer can identify with commonly acknowledged images of the body. This new order is at the juncture between the symbolic and the imaginary, and reveals the viewer’s relation to their own lack of images of their interior. As such, unlike the Lacanian mirror stage central to the process of narcissism, Hatoum offers a performative video milieu to reflect on the absence of identificatory models. The mirror stage is both a moment and a function that reveal the subject’s relation to its image and the subject’s anticipation of the achievement of psychological mastery.44 As such, it creates a psychic economy where subjective images are virtual and real images are like objects. 45 Contrary to the psychical locality 42 43 44 45

Nancy 2010, p. 17. Philippi 1994, p. 26. Ibid., pp. 75–79. Ibid., p. 76.

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of the mirror stage as a moment and a function is the constitution of the subject. The psychic locality of the installation presents an introspective moment highlighting the surface-level and fragile knowledge of the ego. While in narcissism, the ego gets constituted by a differentiation from the external world, 46 the video installation presents an internal world that is unknown. In other words, the installation presents both the most unknown and intimate body images in a clinical and anonymous way. 47 It gives access to the inside of the flesh, penetrating new realms of image making around the body. By doing so, it confronts the viewer with an order of relation that has hierarchized the connection between the image and the body according to the limits of perception. The use of the camera both signals and locates a different register in the function of investment: one that is not narcissistic in the sense that it is not based on an identifiable mirror or representation, but penetrating in the sense that it creates a new realm of exploration and encounter. As such, Corps étranger offers a surprise because it confronts the viewer with little-known images of the body and at the same it suggests a critique of appropriation of the body by imaging technologies. 48 The milieu of video installation art, especially as seen in the work of Mona Hatoum, implicates an embodied experience of space as shaped by technologies. In other words, Hatoum’s installation exposes the viewer to channel projections of an inter-corporeal realm that creates a milieu of encounter between the I and the other. The flesh projected onto the floor becomes a condition without which the psychological model of video falls into the hylomorphic trap so dear to Western theory, namely the dichotomy between form and matter, inside and outside, visible and invisible. For Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the flesh, la chair, is a milieu, a middle path between exterior and interior: the undifferentiable layer of encounter between the inside and outside, the visible and the invisible. The ontological rehabilitation of the sensible is the driving force of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy; one that helps situate that space itself is known through the body since the body is a thing within which resides the I. 49 The flesh is not the skin but the skin belongs to the flesh as much as the flesh belongs to the organs in a way that cannot be discretized, separated, or segregated without losing the life it holds. For Merleau-Monty, the other appears as co-present; I and the other 46 47 48 49

Lacan 1988, p. 79. Philippi 1994, p. 24. See Statman 2004. Merleau-Ponty 1960, p. 210.

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are organs belonging to a single intercorporeity.50 Hatoum’s Corps étranger offers what Merleau-Ponty calls the self-other as two dens; two openings where something can happen that belongs to the same world, the same scene of being.51 Such an approach is less interested in the origin of being than in the simultaneity of taking and being taken in the world.52 It is an approach grounded in the encounter between various layers of unknown forces where the flesh and the desire of togetherness create a new unity. In his reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, psychoanalyst Fabrice Bourlez highlights that desire does not function as lack but as flux, and it is within a fluctuating field between private, intimate, familial as well as social, economic, and technical realms that the subject becomes the effect of connections.53 The molecular approach to desire, namely desire’s modes of operation at an a-perceptible level, is one that highlights the power (as in puissance) of desire to be a-subjective; namely, that desire is always désir de désir (desire for/of desire).54 For Bourlez, by understanding the desiring machines that operate beyond the mythical image of the Oedipus complex, one reconnects with the revolutionary puissance of the unconscious.55 Bourlez, after Deleuze and Guattari, suggests that the formulation n-sexes designates the multiplicities of desiring processes. As such, desire moves beyond the strictly anthropological representation of the two sexes.56 This non-human sexuality is defined by the libidinal investment of the subject that recognizes desire beyond the question of organicity. This investment beyond the organistic constituency of the Oedipus complex gives form to new cartographies of desire: a queering cartography that is post-oedipal, thus welcoming new subjectivities.57 Bourlez offers a “post-oedipal clinique”58 capable of reinventing itself beyond universalizing references: a hospitable clinique, a minor clinique, a queer clinique where queering the body is recognized as “a desirable, precious way of life, a choice that is as normal as it is enviable.”59 In creating a space of assemblages, Bourlez’ clinique and its approach to desire invents an associated milieu where beings can 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Ibid., p. 211. Merleau-Ponty 1988, p. 317. Ibid., p. 320. Bourlez 2018, pp. 79–80. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 126.

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belong and where bodies can become. Through this associated milieu of belonging and becoming desire brings unity to the various elements that are technical, natural, and cultural: it is the revolutionary puissance that creates new collective possibilities. Desire is both psychic and collective, emerging out of a milieu of togetherness, where all the elements are deployed according to their potential: the future they hold while shaping the present.

Conclusion Between the desiring machine and the media-driven milieu of desire, the artists studied in this chapter offer an art of confrontation that refuses representation to project other realms of possibility via the performative dimension of images. These images are not the ones that are programmed to induce and shape desire, as seen in Flusser’s opaque apparatuses of programmed signif icance,60 nor they are reduced to a discrete regime dictated by the capitalist drives to extract, own, produce, and identify. On the contrary, the performative images of these video installation artworks present and confront the viewer with a new grammar of the sensible: one that is centred on desire as inscribed in a milieu and as a relation to that milieu. The grammar of the sensible is concerned with art composed of failures, adjustments, poignance, and performative beginning. It is an art that confronts its viewer with the possibility of an “anticolonial inflection,” to quote Denise Ferreira da Silva. It is an art that refuses to let the other lives of the image go unnoticed. Often transgressive and subversive, this grammar of the sensible is unsettling. It is an art form that performs in the liminal space where indeterminate and ambiguous attributes can provoke uncertainty in the viewer. I interrogate desire in relation to technology through the work of these three video installations, each performing a confrontation that stands against the systemic disappearance of multiple modalities of signification. In this chapter, the performative milieu of video is one that stands as a method to designate both the historical, theoretical, and aesthetic forces valuable for addressing the subversive changes brought about by imaging technologies, and the kind of desiring, desired, and desirable milieu the work of art activates. Focusing on the milieu of desire is an attempt to ask what it takes for the collective dimension of desire to emerge in the first place; it is an attempt to highlight the necessity of an ecology of desire. The political stakes of 60 See Flusser 2011.

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desire are anchored in our collective capacity to invest in the future. At a time where the future seems to lose its collective potential because of the systemic extraction of values by capitalist regimes of oppression, desire becomes an axiom to politically address questions of environmental activism, social struggle, intellectual resistance, and artistic engagement. While the aesthetic of narcissism is central to address the impact of technology on the psychic individual—here the selfie can be understood as a symptom of massive “self-/auto-exposing use of subjectivity”61—I am interested in more subversive practices of video that experiment with the medium as creating an associated milieu made of “significative forms.”62 As Victor Petit highlights, there is no milieu in itself: there is the milieu of a thing, of a body, of an organism, of an individual.63 “The milieu is not what we see, it is what makes us see, the milieu is not that which we talk about, it is what makes us talk.”64 In that sense, the milieu is not the environment because what the milieu does is first and foremost the naming of a relation. The technical milieu of desire is not only the medium of desire, the in-between of relations, it is a processual time-space, an Umwelt.65 In suggesting that there is no milieu in itself, Petit highlights the relational dimension of the milieu while suggesting that the milieu performs as a support, a supplement, a tool, and a condition through which to engage and relate to the world. The milieu in relation to performative images questions desire as the realm of its emergence and the parameters of its intelligibility. By investigating the liminal spaces of encounter—the milieux of desire—I aim to open up a debate on the spatio-temporal field from which diverse desiring processes can emerge. As the driving force of becoming together in the world, desire holds the promise of a newly engendered political responsibility. While different concepts such as “drive,” “pulsion,” “libido,” “bonds,” and “investment” are useful tools to address the complexity of what Spinoza refers as the individual striving to perceive in its own being, one still has to question the performative stage in which desire emerges as a social process in a given milieu.66 As detailed in the introduction, such a performative stage is increasingly shaped by technologically mediated experiences. These experiences are made of projections of images induced by technological programs that have replaced the representational mechanisms 61 Vignola 2015, p. 3. 62 Simondon 1989b, p. 29. 63 Petit 2017, p. 11. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., p. 14. 66 See Spinoza 2007.

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of perception offered by non-technologically mediated objects. Contrary to traditional images, which carry significance through representation (as seen in paintings), technical images (as seen in photographs, films, videos, computer terminals, and television screens) are surfaces that often operate according to “inverted vectors of meaning.”67 The meaning of a technical image is not found in what the image signifies but in what it projects. In other words, technical images are less about the representation of the world and more about modelling the subject’s relation to and vision of reality. While much has been written in visual studies on the object of desire, desire as identification, or desire as a machine of image production, little attention has been paid to the stage, the realm, or the milieu in which desire emerges and evolves within technologically mediated experiences. In this chapter, I aimed to think together not so much the media specificity of one particular type of image (as seen in the mirror like model applied by Krauss), but the togetherness of the media installation space. My goal is to further question how social desire emerges as a collective process of sharing models of perception, program, normativity, and the unpredictable dimension of flesh captured by dispersive and penetrating technology. I have tried to present the triad of desire—its desiring, desired, and desirable milieux—as a critical tool to reassess the margins of possibility left to account for diverse, complex, and multiple ways of being together in the world with technology.

Works Cited Albarrán, Raquel. “Material Encounters: Columbus’s Diario del primer viaje and the Objects of Colonial Latin American and Caribbean Studies.” In The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492–1898), edited by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias, 249–66. London: Routledge, 2020. Archer, Michael, Guy Brett, and Catherine De Zegher. Mona Hatoum. London: Phaidon, 1997. Antoni, Jeannine. “Interview with Mona Hatoum.” BOMB Magazine, April 1, 1998. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Macmillan, 1981. Beller, Jonathan. The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital. London:Pluto Press, 2018. 67 Flusser 2011, p. 50.

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Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. Bourlez, Fabrice. Queer Psychanalyse: Clinique Mineure et Déconstructions du Genre. Paris: Hermann, 2018. Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81(2018):1–15. https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/ buolamwini18a.pdf. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1983. Dumont, Fabienne. “La Roquette, entre enfermement et émancipation.” In Une artiste engagée: variations sur Nil Yalter, edited by Philippe Artières, Pascale Cassagnau, Anne-Marie Duguet, Fabienne Dumont, and Melis Tezkan, 7–22. Paris: a.p.r.e.s éditions, 2016. Dumont, Fabienne. Nil Yalter: A la confluence des mémoires migrantes, féministes, ouvrières et des mythologies. Vitry-sur-Seine: MAC VAL, 2019. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “Reading Art as Confrontation.” e-flux 65 (May-August 2015): 1–6. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/65/336390/reading-art-as-confrontation/. Flusser, Vilém. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Flusser, Vilém. “The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object: An Essay on the Ontological Standing of Photographs.” Leonardo 19, no. 4 (1986): 329–32. https://doi. org/10.2307/1578381. Foucault. Michel. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1975. Gratza, Agnieszka. “Nil Yalter.” Art Agenda Review, March 26, 2015. https://www.eflux.com/criticism/237062/nil-yalter. Guérin, Anaïs. “La Petite Roquette, la double vie d’une prison parisienne, 1836–1974.” Corpus. Carnet de l’histoire de la justice, des crimes et des peines, August 6, 2014. https://portrait-culture-justice.com/2014/08/la-petite-roquette-la-double-vied-une-prison-parisienne-1836-1974-par-anais-guerin.html. Keeling, Kara. The Witch’s Flight. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Krauss, Rosaling. “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” October 1 (1976): 50–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/778507. Kuntzel, Thierry. “Le défilement: A View in Close Up.” Translated by Bertrand Augst. Camera Obscura 1.2 (1977): 50–66. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-1-2_2-50. Kuntzel, Thierry. Title TK. Paris: Anarchive, 2006. Kuntzel, Thierry, and Bill Viola. Deux éternités proches / Two close eternities. Le Fresnoy: Studio National des Arts Contemporains, 2010.

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Lacan, Jacques. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954. Translated by John Forrester. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Lambert, Léopold. États d’Urgence: Une histoire spatiale du continuum colonial français. Paris: Premiers Matins de Novembre, 2021. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le visible et l’invisible. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1988. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signes. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1960. Mignot-Lefebvre, Yvonne. “L’appropriation de la technique vidéo par les femmes.” CinémAction no. 9 (Automne 1979): 88–95. Murray, Ros. “Raised Fists: Politics, Technology, and Embodiment in 1970s French Feminist Video Collectives.” Camera Obscura 31, no. 1.91 (2016): 93–121. https:// doi.org/10.1215/02705346-3454441. Nancy, Jean-Luc. L’Intrus. Paris: Galilée, 2010. Nixon, Steve. Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Nony, Anaïs. “Geology of the Other: The Encounter as Vibration of the Flesh.” Translated by Charlotte Soulpin. La Deleuziana 7 (2017): 187–94. http://www.ladeleuziana. org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/12-Nony-Geology-of-the-Other-FINAL.pdf. Nony, Anaïs, and Phokeng Setai. “Combative Culture and Alienation.” In Creativity Under Confinement, edited by Anaïs Nony and Phokeng Setai, 129–33. Cape Town: About00Time, 2020. Parfait, Françoise. Vidéo: un art contemporain. Paris: Éditions du regard, 2001. Petit, Victor. “Le désir de milieu.” La Deleuziana 6 (2017): 10–25. http://www. ladeleuziana.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Deleuziana6_10-25_Petit.pdf. Philippi, Desa. “Some Body.” In Mona Hatoum, edited by Michael Archer, Guy Brett, and Catherine De Zegher, 24–35. Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1994. Simondon, Gilbert. Du monde d’existence des objets techniques. Paris: Aubier, 1989a. Simondon, Gilbert. L’individu psychique et collective à la lumière des notions de Forme, Information, Potentiel et Métastabilité. Paris: Aubier, 1989b. Slatman, Jenny. “L’imagerie du corps interne.” Methodos 4 (April 2004). http:// journals.openedition.org/methodos/133. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 1977. Spielmann, Yvonne. Video: The Reflexive Medium. Translated by Anja Well and Stan Jone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Spinoza, Baruch de. Ethics. Translated by Robert Misrahi. Paris: Éditions de l’éclat, 2007. Vignola, Paolo. “Alice Beyond the Self ie: To Be Worthy of What Happens to Her.” La Deleuziana 2 (2015): 1–9. http://www.ladeleuziana.org/wpcontent/ uploads/2016/01/Introduction.en_Vignola.pdf.

Conclusion Performative Images as Objects of Philosophical Inquiry Abstract: As a mirror reflection of the performative dimension of the video image, with which the book begins, the conclusion considers the increased discretization of imagination and engages the concomitant narratives about history, knowledge, and technology. I pay attention to video as a technology of the imaginary and formulate the concept of the “discrete imaginary” as an attempt to tackle the often pervasive if not addictive effects of dominant video technology on the informational structure of society. Keywords: video art, philosophy, technology, cultural critique

If we are willing to entertain the hypothesis that capitalism can be periodized by the quantum leaps or technological mutations by which it responds to its deepest systemic crises, then it may become a little clearer why and how video—so closely related to the dominant computer and information technology of the late, or third, stage of capitalism—has a powerful claim for being the art form par excellence of late capitalism. – Frederic Jameson 1

Minding the image of the world is one of the most concrete and yet abstract tasks we perform daily according to sets of informational values that often operate outside of our conscious choices to act and respond. As such, our creative mind, the one that feels emotions and creates affects, is made of these moving images that inhibit our capacity to focus and pay attention. Images from movies, ads, and social media are now creating the discursive structure through which we make sense of the world and belong to it. Not 1

Jameson 1991, p. 76

Nony, A., Performative Images: A Philosophy of Video Art Technology in France. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463722827_con

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only have moving images populated the fabric of our environment, but also the media support of communication has infiltrated the ways in which human beings make sense of their life: how they belong to earth, to its history, its various presents, and potential futures. There are the images we absorb and the ones that we create via the incessant movements of our bodies in time and space. In our increasingly digital world, images become traces, signs, symbols, and often a-semantical figures that populate the collective imaginary of our time. Not only are our brains more addicted than ever to audio-visual stimuli, but our mind itself is now operating according to visual and auditory movement much like in a movie. More than fifty years after the launch of the first public video technology, electronic moving image devices are now everywhere in most societies. They possess an encompassing power to transmit and shape the functions of individuation on both local and global as well as psychic and collective scales. In the years following the second decades of the twenty-first century, it has become clear that the human brain has gone through drastic changes.2 As such, I am writing for a reader that doesn’t read books from start to finish anymore and for a viewer that no longer stands still in front of a single screen in a dark room full of unknown people. These phenomena, I believe are inseparable and inherently tied to the same technological effects, which infiltrate the inner structure of our imaginary to change, perhaps irrevocably, how we belong and make sense of the living milieu we inhabit. This book took the performative dimension of video technology as its principal operation to question the power that video has on our modes of creating gestures, performing utterances, and distributing affects.3 Here, the reader will recognize categories and concepts dear to the critique of representational practices found in performance studies and philosophy of arts and technologies. The book aimed to state the importance of developing a performative approach to the study of media technologies. At the centre of this book lies the question of the performativity of the electronic field of media technologies. Performativity stands outside of the narrative paradigms of dominant media: it functions both as a principle for theorizing new modalities of perception and it operates as a mode of existence of video-objects themselves (tapes, sculptures, installations). By disrupting the relation to past events in the flow of technically produced moving images, performative video objects reveal how technique and culture 2 See Wold and Stoodley 2008; Hayles 2008; Malabou 2009. 3 I use the word gesture in reference to the work of Vilém Flusser, and I thank Emma Minkley for mentioning his work on gestures to me.

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are increasingly linked by specific modes of spatio-temporal expressions, thus exposing the political implication of both technologies of expression and technologies of oppression. In this book I studied a corpus of video works that engage in new modes of relating to reality to argue that moving images and the many formats and structures they carry in video experimentations create a field of technicity that reveals sets of interrogations concerning our relation to technics, technology, and the cultural understanding of reality. I discussed critiques of history writing via memory technology (chapter 1), video spaces as modulating cartographies of exchange (chapter 2), surveillance technology as linked to discriminatory systems of exploitation (chapter 3), and video environments as producing new desiring modalities (chapter 4). In focusing on how video produces different social alliances, I hoped to engage the norms, forces, and operations that are structuring political agendas in post-independence France. This book engaged in multi-media installation works that were deployed in museum installations in art galleries, street protests, and institutions such as the university from the late 1960s onward and stands as a treaty on videology. This treaty asked to what extent our faculties of knowing are now impacted by the increasingly digital life we lead. Videology is about the aesthetic of a specific technological encounter: the world of images (video-image, virtualimage, volume-image, data-image, augmented-image, etc.) and the world of informational systems (broadcasting technologies, artificial intelligence, algorithmic governance, data surveillance and deportation machine, etc). All of these imaging technologies, to borrow a concept developed by Don Ihde, are central to this book. I engaged in the technologically embodied knowledge we produce to create a theoretical cartography of the psychic and collective challenges brought about by video technologies. Videology is thus concerned with the necessity of moving away from the realm of representation (as in ideology and the content of the image of thought) to focus on operations (as the new “equipment of thought” that are implemented via media technology). 4 Videology interrogates various operative realms of existence, such as virtuality, simulation, and network systems of exchange. It revaluates and creates concepts that speak to our increasingly networked world, one in which notions of transmission, exchange and movement are going through radical revaluation. Ultimately, such a treatise on videology is concerned with the epistemological power of video to shape the spiritual, 4 On the shift from representation to operation and its consequence on the critique of ideology, see Benoît Dillet’s work on the notion of noology. Dillet, Benoît. “For a Critique of Noology.” Parallax 23.2 (2017): 164–83.

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imaginative, and mental structure of the νόος (soul), a structure made of the intermittent and thus fluctuating operations of the soul. This book sought to bring together three realms of critical inquiry: media operation, geo-political struggles, and platforms of computational capitalism. In doing so, it sought to revaluate the political implication of art and video technology at a time where the institution of the western university is invited, if not pressured, to revaluate the canonical figures, methods, and structures it has sustained throughout history.5 I took the rise of both digital studies and decolonial methodology as an opportunity to rethink what it means to forge media concepts, to question media platforms of communication, and to advocate for the arts. Personally, I am interested in an anti-colonial approach to media archaeology because I believe in the study of the material genealogy of aesthetic apparatuses as well as the theoretical imperative to renew cultural critique along with a critique of history and technology. This book tried to show that video (both its operation and distribution) offers a practical space to study how new forms of technique are defining our contemporary situation and how these forms of production relate to new sets of gender, class, and racial indeterminacies. Videology questions the ways in which video, as an electronic medium, has been fundamental in shaping our moving-image modes of existence. This book defines cinematic modes of existence as the moment through which nature and culture are forged by technical sets of operations that themselves produce specific temporal modulations (such as transduction, synchronization, and disruption). The cinematic is thus not circumscribed to the medium of cinema. On the contrary, the cinematic here has more to do with the ongoing movement between the cultural and the technical realms of society than it has to do with the filmic modality of accessing and making sense of the real. The cinematic mode of existence thus addresses the ubiquitous portrayal of the individual in networked society.6 It questions the collective dimension of our structure of projection, imagination, and invention to assess the margin of possibility left in the production of thought. The cinematic focuses precisely on the movement at stake in the temporal flow of a certain medium. That which produces a movement and that which is defined by it is already cinematic. When Jules-Etienne Marey developed his méthode graphique (graphic methods), he created a cinematic relationship to biomechanics that helped unpack the infra-connexion of bodily movements. 5 See Grosfoguel 2013. 6 The work of Jonathan Beller on the cinematic mode of production is of great importance in highlighting the dematerialized process of social production through technologies.

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Even though his medium was photography, the temporal dimension of his chronophotographs is geared towards physiological understanding of movement: the cinematic relation of an object in space and time. Another example of the cinematic is found in the operational technicality of the train. As depicted by Walter Benjamin, the train offered a cinematic of landscape viewing. Understanding the power of contemporary time technologies demands that we take into account the new cinematic mode of existence that is performing within our media-driven milieu. One major challenge this book sought to address is the predatory tendency of media technologies that monopolize attention and reduce our capacities to take care, leaving us in a frantic world where knowledge is increasingly substituted for data. As such, this treatise on videology questions the becoming cinematic of our relation to the world. It responds to the need to revaluate concepts, such as representation, time, and space in dialogue with the new intermediary modes of individuation that are being produced, processed, and distributed via post-industrial sensory apparatuses, such as the television monitor and the video. This treaty takes videography, a telecommunication procedure that transmits alphanumerical and graphical message onto a screen, as a philosophical question. It proposes the notion of videology to further question the operation of thoughts, relations, affects, knowledge and emotions that video images produce outside and within us. Videology is thus interested in the becoming cinematic of our mode of existence as well as the technical mode of existence of moving images. By using the notion of the discrete imaginary, I aimed to interrogate the infiltration of the imaginary modes of connectivity and significations in a world where video operations are now the determining forces of knowledge exchange. Performatives images, this book argues, are grounded in the discretization of our mode of apprehending the world. Discrete is both the notion of something happening without notice or without the intention of being paid attention to, and the notion of something happening separately. The discrete is that which happens under the cover of something or someone else. It stands as an attempt not to draw too much attention to the activity at stake. The discretization of our psychic and collective imaginaries is the central operation of digital technologies that not only operate in an increasingly synchronized manner for the sake of constant communication but create an imaginary platform of symbolic signification to insert the operation of thought it wants to impose. The discretization of our imaginary announces both the passing unnoticed of structures that shape both psychic

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and collective imaginaries and the segregation of such imaginary from other operations of sense-making such as sublimation and projection. This book engaged video art and activist practices to understand how they confront and modulate the effects of image technologies on contemporary life. By means of the concept of the “performative image,” I presented a new regime of the image with the qualities of operation and defined the performative dimension of video technology as its capacity to act as an agent of reality. This book presented a methodology founded in performance studies and the philosophy of technology to show how video technologies are shaping psychic and social life due to the various operations they perform on cultural practices and historical realities.

Works Cited Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production. Attention Economy and the Society of Spectacle. Lebanon: University Press of New England, 2006. Dillet, Benoît. “For a Critique of Noology.” Parallax 23, no. 2 (2017): 164–83. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1299292. Flusser, Vilém. Gestures. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Grosfoguel, Ramón. “The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self Knowledge 11, no. 1 (2013): 73–90. https://www.scinapse.io/papers/164054613. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Ihde, Don. Postphenomenology and Technoscience. The Peking University Lectures. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. Jameson, Frederic. Potsmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Malabou, Catherine. What Should We Do with Our Brain? New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. Wolf, Maryanne, and Catherine J. Stoodley. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.



Artworks Cited

Acconci, Vito. 1971. Centers. Video tape: 22 min. 28 sec., black and white, sound. New York: John Gibson Gallery, Washington: Protetch-Rivkin Gallery. 1971. Baladi, Roland. 1973. Écrire Paris avec les rues de cette ville. Video performance: half-inch reader, wide viewfinder camera, motorcycle. The portapack camera mounted on a bike shoots the view of a trip tracing the word PARIS with capital’s streets. Art Vidéo Confrontation, Animation Recherche Confrontation (ARC), Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris. 1974. Birnbaum, Dara. 1978–1979. Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman. Video tape: 5 min. 50 sec., colour, sound. New York: The Kitchen Center for Video and Music. 1979. Buchanan, Beverly. 1981. Marsh Ruins. Environmental sculpture: made of large mounds of cement and shell-based tabby concrete and placed in Brunswick, Georgia to memorialize sites of Black presence, these markers symbolically bear witness to the 1803 mass suicide of enslaved Igbo people who collectively drowned themselves off the coast of nearby St. Simons Island. Campus, Peter. 1975. dor. Video installation: one surveillance video camera, one video projector (originally Kalart Victor analogue projector), projection on the wall, image approximatively two metres wide, hallway, darkened room, white walls. New York: The Bykert Gallery. January 11–30, 1975. Chenzira, Ayoka. 1984. Hair Piece: A Film for Nappy-Headed People. Animated film: 16 mm film, colour, sound, 10 min. Croiset, Nicole and Nil Yalter. 1980. Rituels. Video Performance: the space is divided into two equal zones, each containing a video monitor and a camera. Les Rituels vividly illustrates the role played by patriarchal constraints in everyday behaviour. Animation Recherche Confrontation (ARC), Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. February 23, 1980.

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Douglas, Stan. 1988. Ouverture. Single-channel 16 mm film installation: 6 min. (loop), black and white, sound. Eid-Sabbagh, Yasmine. 2014. On Violence. Event: 33 min. It Makes Us Think of a Dance and a Fête as Much as of War (On Violence), EVA International, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art. March 2014. Export, Valie. 1971. Facing a Family. Expanded movie and TV action: 4 min. 44 sec., black and white, sound. Kontakt, Premiered: ORF. February 28, 1971. Hatoum, Mona. 1988. Measures of Distance. Video tape: colour, sound, 15 min., 26 sec. Hatoum, Mona. 1994. Corps étranger. Video installation: cylindrical structure, video beamer, video recorder, audio amplifier, four loudspeakers 350 × 300 × 300 centimetres. Paris: Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre George Pompidou. 1994. Hidalgo de la Riva, Osa. 1996. Marginal Eyes or Mujeta Fantasy 1. Video Tape. Ikam, Catherine. 1980. Dispositif pour un parcours vidéo. Video installation. This installation comprises the following artworks by Ikam: Identité I. One black and white, fifty-one centimetres, one 3/4-inch U-matic video tape recorder, one fire extinguisher in a 9 × 2 metre corridor, one black and white video tape of fifty minutes pre-recorded by the Audiovisual Service of the Centre Georges Pompidou on January 16, 1980; Identité II. Seven black and white monitors (twenty-three centimetres diagonal image), one black and white surveillance camera, two 2/4-inch U-matic video recorders, one time/delay device; Identité III. Eleven black and white monitors (forty-seven centimetres, thirty-six centimetres, twenty-three centimetres), eight black and white cameras, lenses equipped with 500-, 300-, and 200-millimetre focal lengths; Sculpture fragments d’un archétype. Matte black sheet; video; neon sixteen black and white monitors (f ifty-one centimetres, image diagonal), sixteen 3/4-inch VCRs. Metal structure designed by Jacques Lichnérovitz, dimensions: 3.2 × 3.2 metres, neon circumference: diameter four metres, dancer: Quentin Rouiller. Director of the Moebius Group Technical realization: Hamid Hamidi and Marc Maillard. Paris: Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou.

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Joan, Jonas. 1972. Vertical Roll. Video tape: black and white, sound, 19 min. 38 sec. Vertical Roll was shot in the Ace Gallery in Los Angeles while rehearsing the Organic Honey performance. Some of the images came from Visual Telepathy but others were developed in relation to the structure of the signal malfunction known as a vertical roll. Video performance offered the possibility of multiple and simultaneous view point. Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll, Los Angeles: Ace Gallery; San Francisco: San Francisco Art Institute; Valencia: California Institute of the Arts. 1972. Jonas, Joan. 1992. Revolted by the Thought of Known Places. Video Installation: work in progress first set and shown in Berlin. Production: KunstWere Berlin and Llurex Video. Actors for the performance in Berlin: Sven Lehmann, Marie Goyette, Bob Rutman and students from the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin. Kuntzel, Thierry. 1974. Le Tombeau de Saussure (Double Entrave). Installation: marble plaque (21 × 27 × 3 centimetres) placed on the floor, leaning against the wall, on which is engraved a text by Ferdinand de Saussure: “Whether I write the letters in black or white, in hollow or in relief, with a pen or a chisel, it is irrelevant for their meaning.” Kuntzel, Thierry. 1976. Memory. Installation: twelve white neon lights of decreasing intensity placed in a row at eye level, with their transformers on the ground (blue boxes with inscription ‘danger of death’). Paris: Théâtre Campagne-Première. November 1976. Kuntzel, Thierry. 1977. Here There Then. Installation: composed of three neon lights of different intensities that cannot be embraced with a single glance. Here and Then are hung on the wall; the third, There, is suspended from the ceiling and reflects on a white marble slab placed on the floor (21 × 29.7 × 7 centimetres). Paris: Galerie Ghislain Mollet-Viéville. January 8–31, 1977. Kuntzel, Thierry. 1979. Nostos I. Video tape: 45 min., colour, no sound. Production: Institut National de l’Audiovisuel. Kuntzel, Thierry. 1980. Buena Vista. Video tape: 27 min., no sound, colour. Production: Television Office de Berkeley. Kuntzel, Thierry. 1980. Echolalia. Video tape: 32 min., colour, music: Jean-Yves Bosseur. Production: Institut National de l’Audiovisuel.

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Kuntzel, Thierry. 1980. La desserte blanche. Video installation: 22 min., no sound. A video monitor inserted into a wall panel. All-white room. Intense light (white fluorescent tubes on the ceiling). White benches. Production: Institut National de l’Audiovisuel. Les Immatériaux, Paris: Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre George Pompidou. 1985. Kuntzel, Thierry. 1980. Still. Video tape: 24 min., no sound, colour. Production: Institut National de l’Audiovisuel. Kuntzel, Thierry. 1980. Time Smoking a Picture. Video tape: 38 min., no sound, colour. Production: Institut National de l’Audiovisuel. Video about video, Berkeley: University Art Museum; New York: Alliance Française. October, 1980. Kuntzel, Thierry. 1984 Nostos II. Video installation: Paris: Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre George Pompidou. November 12–December 24, 1985. Kuntzel, Thierry. 1989. Été (Double Vue). Video installation: 7 min., no sound with Ken Moody and Irina Dalle. A small monitor and a projection on a large screen facing each other, far enough away not to have been embraced with a single glance. Dark room; Length: eight metres and fifty-nine centimetres, width: six metres, height: three metres and fifty centimetres. Production: Centre National des Arts Plastiques. Kuntzel, Thierry. 1991. Hiver, la mort de Robert Walser. Video installation: 5 min. and 30 sec., no sound, with Ken Moody. Three large projections side by side in a space where the viewer does not have enough distance to grasp them together. Length ten metres, width four metres and f ifty centimetres, height: three metres and f ifty centimetres. Production: Archipel 33. Kuntzel, Thierry. 1993. Moins un (Autobiographie d’un autre). Video installation: a dark, sonorous piece that must be crossed to go from one Season to another. Music by Lou Reed. Kuntzel, Thierry. 1993. Printemps (Pas de Printemps). Video installation: with Ken Moody and Irina Dalle. 3 min. 35 sec. Triptych identical to that of Hiver. Production: Archipel 33. Paris: Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume.

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Kuntzel, Thierry. 2003. The Wave. Video Installation: Festival d’Automne, Paris: Agnès b. October 21–November 21, 2003. Kuntzel, Thierry. 2007. La Peau. Film installation: Biennale de l’Image en mouvement, Genève: Bâtiment d’art contemporain. December 12–16, 2007. Lelliott, Kitso Lynn. 2015. My story no doubt is me/Older than me. Video installation: 5 min. 56 sec., colour, no sound. Seven Hills, Kampala: 2nd Kampala Art Biennale. September 3–October 2, 2016. Lelliott, Kitso Lynn. 2016. I was her and she was me and those we might become. Video installation: 20 min. Johannesburg: Room Gallery. September 2–October 14, 2017. Lelliott, Kitso Lynn. 2016. Untitled Sankofa 1. Video installation: ninth edition of the annual Lagos Photo Festival in Lagos. October 27–November 15, 2018. Les Insoumuses Collective. 1976. Maso et Miso vont en bateau. Video tape: 55 min., black and white, sound. Film shot after Bernard Pivot’s show “Encore un jour et l’année de la femme, ouf! C’est fini.” Paris: Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir. Roussopoulos, Carole. 1970. Jean Genet parle d’Angela Davis. Video tape: 7 min. 30 sec., black and white, sound. The day after the arrest of Angela Davis in October 1970, Jean Genet read three times a text denouncing the racist policies of the United States, supporting the Black Panther Party and Angela Davis, for a television programme that was eventually censored. Roussopoulos, Carole. 1973. Enterrement of Mahmoud Al Hamchari. Video tape: 13 min. 40 sec., black and white, sound. Following the Mossad’s assassination of Mahmoud al Hamchari, the PLO’s first representative in Paris, the Palestinian community, accompanied by its few political supporters in France, gathered in a cemetery on the outskirts of Paris to pay him a last tribute. Paris: Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir Sedira, Zineb. 2002. Mother Tongue. Video installation: three videos 5 min. each, sound, colour: Mother and I (France), Daughter and I (England), Mother and Granddaughter (Algeria). New York: Brooklyn Museum.

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Sedira, Zineb. 2010. The End of the Road. Video installation: two screens projection with sound. Shot on Super 16 mm film. 15 min. 16:9 format. Commissioned for the exhibition Told Untold Retorld by Mathaf, Doha: Arab Museum of Modern Art. Sedira, Zineb. 2010. Lighthouse in the Sea of Time. Video installation: six screens video installation (Part I, II, and III). Shot on 16 mm f ilm, format 16:9. Part I – Four screens installation, 15 min. Part II – Single projection: The Life of a Lighthouse keeper, 11 min. Kent: Folkestone Triennial, 2011. Sedira, Zineb. 2012. Transmettre en abyme. Video installation: three screens video installation. Part I: single screen, colour, 18 min. Format 16:9. Part II: double screens. 15 min., black and white. Format 16:9. “Ici, ailleurs,” Marseille: la Friche Belle de Mai, 2013. Serra, Richard. 1974. Boomerang. Video tape: 10 min., colour, sound. Production: Castelli-Sinnabend. New York: Leo Castelli Gallery, October 12–26, 1974. Tan, Fiona. 1999. Tuareg. Video installation: one video projector, four speakers, one translucent projection screen, digitized film archives from 1931 presented in loop. Paris: Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre George Pompidou. Vidéa Collective. 1971. Grève de femmes à Troyes. Video tape: 53 min., black and white, sound. “The first feminist videos were marked by the documentary Grève de femmes à Troyes, in spring 1971, made collectively using a Portapak by Cathy Bernheim, Ned Burgess, Catherine Deudon, Suzanne Fenn and Annette Levy Willard, then by the formation of Vidéa in July 1974 by Catherine Lahourcade and Son Guérin, who had learned how to use light video cameras in New York. Thanks to the intervention of Isabelle Fraisse and Anne-Marie Faure-Fraisse, they were given access to the editing facilities at the École des Beaux-Arts where one of them was studying architecture. The group had two portable half-inch cameras. In May 1978, with Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig and Ioana Wieder, they organized a week-on festival at the République cinema titled Une bande de femmes présentent des bandes de femmes, at which a score of vidéos were continuously played on seven monitors. Nil Yalter was among those involved.1 1

Dumont 2019, p. 173.

Art work s Cited

183

Video Out Collective. 1975. Les prostituées de Lyon parlent. Video tape: 46 min. 28 sec., black and white, sound. In June 1975, prostitutes from Lyon occupied the church of Saint-Nizier. They talk about their personal history, their relationship with society, their working conditions and their demands. Paris: Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir. Yalter, Nil and Judy Blum. 1973–1975. Paris, ville lumière. Installation: twenty textile panels, texts and images. Grenoble: Maison de la Culture. September 23–October 30, 1977. Yalter, Nil and Nicole Croiset and Judy Blum. 1974–1975. La Roquette, prison de femmes. Installation: sixteen collages: photographs and coloured pencil on cardboard, each 25.5 × 31.5 centimetres; sixteen drawings: coloured pencil on cardboard, each 25.5 × 31.5 centimetres, folder with fifty-six photographs and text; single-channel video, 23 min., black and white, sound. The tape was shown by appointment at Point 13, a space recently opened by Annie Poinsot at 13, rue des Grands Augustins, Paris. At the time, the piece was titled Travail sur la Roquette. Yalter, Nil. 1974. La Femme sans tête ou La Danse du ventre. Video tape: 24 min., black and white, sound. Yalter is filmed by Joël Boutteville, the video required a number of extra shoots, which were done in two days. Shown in the first major video exhibition to be put on in France Art Vidéo Confrontation, Animation Recherche Confrontation (ARC), Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, November 8–December 8, 1974. As Fabienne Dumont points out, the historic video exhibition at the ARC featured many other feminist videos: Female Sensibility 1974 by Linda Benglis, Le corps féminin comme échelle de toute chose 1974 by Frederike Pezold, Peau neuve 1973 by Nicola, and Pelotage et cache-bibi by Françoise Janicot 1972. Yalter, Nil. 1979. Harem. Video tape: 53 min., black and white, sound. The video made in 1980 is part of an installation The Harem including a dozen panels composed of drawings, photographs and texts. Yalter, Nil. 2009. Lapidation. Video tape: 10 min., colour, sound. Revisits the themes of La Femme sans tête ou la danse du ventre 1974 while denouncing the killing of a young Shiite girl aged seventeen in Iraq because of her love for a Sunni man.

Acknowledgements This book has been in the making for some time. As a result, the perseverance of readers who went over several drafts of these chapters has been critical to its completion. I would like to thank my editor, Maryse Elliott at Amsterdam University Press and my copy-editor Emma Daitz for their support. I especially want to thank Charlotte Soulpin and Erika Weiberg for their extremely attentive and helpful comments on the manuscript throughout the years, Chanelle Dupuis for her excellent archival assistance on Thierry Kuntzel’s work, and Anne Savenay for her heart-warming encouragements. A special thanks to Nil Yalter for the continuous inspiration and book cover. It is a great honour to print photographs of Yalter’s very first video work La femme sans tête, ou la danse du ventre from 1974. Over the past ten years I have been lucky to work with some wonderful mentors whose generosity, encouragement, and intellectual investment have been extremely helpful. Beyond sharing their brilliant ideas and time, for which I am forever grateful, they gave me, often discretely, always bigheartedly, the dose of confidence I needed to write. They gave me the indispensable tips, references, and feedback a first book requires. Equally important, they made me laugh, fed me, wrote to me, travelled with me, and listened to many of my obscure ideas. I would like to dedicate this book to a trio of mentors that I have had the immense honour to have: Jane Blocker, John Mowitt, and Bernard Stiegler. Several institutions have been central in securing funding for this research. I want to thank the Institut d’Études Théâtrales at the Université SorbonneNouvelle, the Department of Performance Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, the Department of French and the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, the Winthrop-King Institute at Florida State University, the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, and the Govan Mbeki Research and Development Centre at Fort Hare University. Students have been a source of inspiration and I thank them for constantly redefining what we mean by both urgent and important. From the theatre workshops where they played with masks to the digital studies seminars where they monitored their online behaviours, they have continuously amazed me with their courage to deepen the real and ask many whys: why

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are screens so addictive, why can’t people concentrate, why are imagined and lived images equally important to the foundation of thoughts, of dreams? Loved ones have inspired and assisted this work at various points. It is shaped by their time, support, endless encouragement, laughter and care over the years: Mahvish Ahmed, Sepideh Azari, Sarah Baranzoni, Fabrice Bourlez, Malia Bruker, Christophe Castagné, Carolina Centeno Haro, Typhaine Dee, Benoît Dillet, Jeanne Etelain, Gabrielle Folio, Marion Havard, Fabien Hildelbert, Emilia Marra, Lebohang Mojapelo, Jean-Sébastien Laberge, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Ya-Hsuan Li, Julie Nxadi, Gaëlle Lutaud, Clarys LutaudNony, Marie-Anne Nony, Danielle Olivier, Victor Petit, Cole Pulice, Anna Rosensweig, David Rodriguez, Gabriel Saenz, Reza Salie, Raquel Schefer, Phokeng Tshepo Setai, Ashley Scarlett, Hannah Schwadron, Mohammad Shabangu, Zuko Sikhafungana, Gayani Siriwardena, Charlotte Soulpin, Caroline Fayat, Silvia Valisa, Paolo Vignola, Gwendy Vincent, Erika Weiberg, Paul Willemarck, Alexander Wilson, and Damon Young. I am grateful for the fierce sista in my life: Reem El-Radi, Rita Kompelmhaker, and Selina Tirtjana. Thank you for being the friends that know how to be so poignantly present, even from afar. A celestial hug to my dear Raquel Albarrán whose vision and care for the artistic and activist world will guide my heart forever. Finally, my deepest gratitude to the writers I have had the privilege to accompany in the last few years. Thank you for your trust. Thank you for all you share. Thank you for your rawness and for letting me see through the depth and complexities of your life stories. Seeing you heal, grow, and publish your research has been a top motivation to complete this manuscript.

Index a-signification 52, 127, 131 a-significant data 15 a-significative units 11 abstraction 69, 121, 126, 127, 131 activism 7, 15, 26, 27, 96, 101, 101, 104, 147 activist 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, 21, 24, 115, 143, 146, 154 activist practices 7, 176 acts 11, 111, 121, 124, 158 of recognition 83 of resistance 34 of viewing 82, 83, 94, 101 aesthetics 15, 27, 38, 40, 49, 59, 66, 155 media aesthetics 71 of narcissism 40, 141, 142, 167 see also Krauss, Rosalind agency 13, 49, 52, 55, 56, 74, 81, 87, 136, 162 human agency 115, 130 operational agency 62, 63, 75 see also Ina, Blom agent of reality 7, 11, 176 algorithms 12, 17, 73, 114, 129, 130, 132, 134 see also performing entities Althusser, Louis 40, 109, 114, 124-26, 131, 135 see also Ideological State Apparatus; imaginary relation; interpellation analogico-digital image 36, 38, 56 see also Stiegler, Bernard analogue 10-12, 36-38, 49, 54 anticipation 11-14, 59, 163 apparatus 25, 26, 29, 32, 38, 60, 64, 87, 88, 91, 95, 96, 99, 115, 118, 120, 133 cinematic apparatus 35, 158 filmic apparatus 68, 69, 156 ideological apparatus 125, 126 image and 19, 21, 82, 83, 86, 104 mental apparatus 12, 69, 70 psychic apparatus, 39 67, 72 state apparatus 127, 132 technical apparatus 31, 56 see also Metz, Christian archival materials 25, 54, 89, 102, 127 audience 20n38, 30, 31, 49, 56-63, 83, 100, 118-20, 157, 160, 162 audio-visual experience 96, 104, 116 installation 85, 116 autonomy 17, 24, 31 Averty, Jean-Christophe 15, 20 Belloir, Dominique 27, 93 Bellour, Raymond 34, 65, 96 Bentham, Jeremy 127, 128 144, 147 see also panopticon Big Data ideology 40, 109, 126, 129, 130, 133-37 definition 127 Big Data 73, 74, 131

Big Data economy 127, 132 see also Rouvroy, Antoinette Birnbaum, Dara 21, 27, 30 Bishop, Claire 24, 29, 62 see also installation Blocker, Jane 24n52, 93 Blom, Ina 7, 31, 49, 50, 52 see also agency Blum, Judy 15, 40, 99-101, 143-48 bodily presence 8, 23, 82, 99, 101 bodily capture 121, 129 body 7, 11, 29, 37, 56, 71, 92, 103, 105, 131, 134-137, 142, 160-67 Kuntzel and 110-12, 115, 117-123, 128, 144, 157-59 La Roquette 149, 151, 155 Yalter and 93-99, 146 see also racialised body broadcasting technology 19, 21, 28, 173 broadcasted images 20, 24 Buchanan, Beverly 21, 22 camera 23, 24, 28, 38, 48, 84-90, 95, 97, 98, 110, 111, 119-21, 143, 151, 162-64 endoscopic camera 145, 161 portable, 20, 22, 115 Portapak 19, 93 programmed camera 111, 117, 118, 120, 128 see also Roussopoulos, Carole Campus, Peter 27, 143 capitalism 32, 114, 134, 171 computational capitalism 80, 174 cartography 79, 80, 92, 95, 100, 101, 165, 173 Césaire, Aimé 114, 133n37, 135n81 Chosification 114, 133-35 see also Césaire, Aimé Chun, Wendy 48 citizen journalists 20, 119, 120 colonialism 89, 92, 115, 134 coloniality 40, 79, 103, 114 colonization 40, 79, 101 communication 16, 17, 23, 24, 33, 34, 39, 59, 81, 82, 84, 103, 104, 121, 131, 159, 160, 172 platforms of communication 105, 174 confrontation 13, 93, 101, 154, 155 art of confrontation 162, 166 see also Denise, Ferreira da Silva contemporary life 7, 16, 27, 176 contemporary society 10, 34 content 28, 30, 34, 67, 68n60, 71, 81, 88, 126, 132, 173 form and 16, 23 control 17, 33, 82, 92, 113-15, 121, 122, 128-30, 131, 144, 160 algorithmic control 38

188  incarceration and 40, 109 critical inquiry 19, 23, 34, 174 Croiset, Nicole 15, 23, 40, 141, 144, 145, 147, 148 cultural critique 9, 10, 19, 111n8, 172, 174 cultural practices 12, 35, 176 cultural topography 79, 85, 86, 99 see also topography; Sandoval, Chela; Tan, Fiona cybernetics 17, 19, 33, 50, 60, 81, 112 darkness 110, 117 data mining of the body 121, 122 Deleuze, Gilles 18, 33, 60, 64, 65, 125, 159, 165 see also society of control, time-image Denise, Ferreira da Silva 13, 141, 162, 166 see also art of confrontation Derrida, Jacques 10, 18, 36, 55, 65, 71, 72, 124 see also grammatology, technique desire 12, 13, 27, 39, 40, 41, 48, 57, 141-168 Dillet, Benoît 48, 173n4 digital age 115, 116, 130-133 digital computing 60, 114, 116 disciplinary society 33, 128 discrete image 35-38 see also Stiegler, Bernard discrete imaginary 31, 39, 41, 171, 175 discrete-state machines 35, 39, 49, 50, 112-14, 129 discrete structures 38, 39 discretization 35, 37-39, 41, 49, 171, 175 dissemination 13, 35, 37, 129 distance 14, 29, 60, 61, 118, 144, 160 distribution of the sensible 38 grammaticalization of the sensible 35 documentary 15, 20, 27, 55, 84-90, 95, 102, 146 dominant structure of representation 40, 79, 80, 83, 84 dominant epistemologies 20, 154 dominant media 14, 55, 172 dominant order 82, 88, 129, 130 Dubois, Philippe 21n41, 26, 27 Duguet, Anne-Marie 26, 34, 50, 67, 118 Dumont, Fabienne 97, 101n68, 148n15, 154n27 défilement (scrolling) 86, 87, 90, 103, 156 reverse scrolling 85, 89, 105 déroulement (rolling out) 86, 90, 103 definition, 82 dérèglement (un-ruling) 82, 103 electrification of life 81, 92 embodied experience 83, 134, 161, 162, 164 embodied subjects 25, 37 see also Bishop, Claire embodiment 13, 16, 60, 64 encounter 16, 30, 62, 63, 85, 97, 101, 102, 110, 143, 145, 147, 155, 159, 162-165, 167 embodied encounter 158 performative encounter 15 technological encounter 9, 16, 173

Performative Images

entrenched theory of memory 39, 47 epistemologies 9, 20, 24, 26, 32, 154 epistemes 14 neo-colonial epistemes 113 techno-epistemes 136, 137 ethnographic film 86, 88-90 definition 85 existence 9, 22, 38, 41, 50, 51, 99, 101, 125, 126, 129, 141 see also modes of existence experience 8, 10, 13, 12, 19, 24, 25, 28-31, 35, 38, 48-52, 54-66, 69, 71, 74-76, 84-85, 99, 100, 102, 104, 110, 114, 126, 132 aesthetic experience 25, 162 bodily experience 12, 150 embodied experience 83, 134, 161, 162, 164 lived experience 10, 115 mediated experience 49, 143, 167, 168 visual experience 30, 59, 96, 110, 121 exploitation 28, 92, 101, 112, 128, 173 Export, Valie 21, 27 Fanon, Frantz 40, 109, 114, 130, 136n89 feminist 17, 20, 21, 32,97, 146, 149, 153, 154 feminist collective 148, 149 flesh 94, 95, 98, 141, 143, 156, 157, 160, 162, 164, 165, 168 Flusser, Vilém 12, 150, 166, 172n3 see also technical image Foucault, Michel 33, 115, 133, 144, 147 see also disciplinary society; governmentality France 9, 15, 16, 19-22, 32, 52, 83, 85, 88, 93, 97, 99, 100, 101, 104, 115, 122, 126, 144-47, 154, 173 gaze 24, 33, 66, 81, 83, 84, 89, 90, 96, 97, 103, 105, 110, 111, 121, 130, 142, 145, 148, 150, 154, 157-59 imperial gaze 40, 79, 85, 86, 88, 92 human gaze 120, 160 genealogy 11, 16, 48, 99, 113-115, 128, 129, 136, 174 Genet, Jean 20, 147 gesture 95, 103, 115, 116, 142, 149, 151, 172 daily 8, 22, 23, 148, 152 Gilmore, Ruth 40, 109, 112, 135 see also premature death Giroud, Françoise 27, 28 Godard, Jean-Luc 19, 20 governmentality 48 algorithmic control 38 algorithmic governmentality 17, 133, 134 see also Rouvroy, Antoinette grammaticalization 36, 38 grammatology 55 see also Derrida, Jacques Hansen, Mark 11n10, 64, 132, 135 Hatoum, Mona 15, 27, 40, 141, 143-45, 159-165

Index

Hegemony 19, 92 historical realities 7, 10, 11, 12, 27, 34, 79, 112, 115, 176 historical moment 141, 144 historiography 25, 83, 100, 127 human memory 39, 47, 48 consciousness, 114, 132 sense of time 50, 62, 63 identity 8, 19, 23, 82, 83, 101, 103, 121, 142, 154, 155, 159 cultural identity 30, 102 identity politics 14 ideology 21, 40, 110, 124-27, 130-37 Ideological State Apparatuses 131 see also Althusser, Louis idiotext 39, 47, 57, 65 definition 55 see also Stiegler, Bernard Ikam, Catherine 15, 20, 28 image objects 11, 12, 31, 157 image technologies 7, 19, 27, 34, 47, 90, 99, 176 image technician 24, 54, 55, 72 definition 28 see also Spielmann, Yvonne incarceration 40, 110, 145, 147, 148, 152-54 individuation 57, 81, 104, 144, 172, 175 informational technology 51, 81-82, 113 informatics 16, 50, 114 informational structure 41, 136, 171 informational trajectory of society 35, 81-82, 84, 92, 136 information transmission 47, 48, 84 injustice 119, 129 installation 8, 9, 15, 24, 25, 27, 28, 53, 56, 58-63, 65, 67, 87-90, 99, 100, 102, 104, 110, 111, 118, 122, 129, 144-50,152-54, 156, 158-64, 168, 173 see also Bishop, Claire installation art 15, 21, 25, 26, 29-31, 63, 64, 99, 143, 145, 146, 158, 164, 166 Kuntzel’s installation 63, 116n28, 117, 117n33, 120, 129 multi-media installation 15, 144, 147, 173 museum installation 15, 29, 53, 111, 112, 173 Tan’s installation 87-90 instrumentalization 75, 112, 115, 132, 134 interpellation 88, 101, 114, 131 interpellative power 11 models of interpellation 40, 109, 126, 129, 130, 135 see also Althusser, Louis; Fanon, Franz Jonas, Joan 27, 29, 51, 143 knowledge 9, 11, 14-16, 21, 22, 31, 35, 39, 48, 91, 100, 121, 125, 136, 162, 164, 175 forms of 137, 149 formation 75, 76 production and 82, 89, 95, 112, 115, 150

189 technology and 7, 8, 10, 34, 41, 84, 171, 173 transmission 13, 83, 92 Krauss, Rosalind 142, 145, 150, 158, 161, 169 Kuntzel, Thierry 15, 22, 23, 27, 39, 40, 47, 51, 55, 56-72, 75, 109-112, 115-122, 129, 142-45, 156-59 see also body; videogram; zone of contact Lambert, Leopold 123n42, 144 language 8, 10, 11, 54-57, 66, 82, 83, 101 -103, 131, 160 Lelliott, Kitso Lynn 8-10 liminal space 50, 82, 95, 118, 166, 167 living entity 80, 145 logic 95, 112, 127, 131, 132, 133, 142 love 80, 95, 97, 159, 160 Lyotard, Jean-François 17, 18, 53 material agency 74, 75 material conditions 18, 129 materiality 28, 29, 35, 59, 61, 63, 131 media aesthetics 66, 71 media experience 62-64, 71 media object 12, 28, 29, 31, 51, 62-64, 74, 75, 104 media-driven 13, 19, 104, 131, 143, 166, 175 media studies 14, 16, 27, 143, 150 media technology 11, 16, 40, 49, 50n10, 56, 63, 64, 79, 132, 173 mediated image 31, 127, 128 technologically mediated experience 143, 167, 168 medium 24, 26-29, 31, 37, 58, 59, 70n66, 84, 93, 96, 101, 104, 142, 145, 148-150, 152, 167, 174, 175 medium specificity 31, 56 memory 12, 16, 21, 40, 49-60, 65, 66-69, 73, 76, 111, 173 human memory 39, 48, 74 memory formation 63, 64, 70, 75 memory-volume 51, 71, 72 Merleau-Ponty 37, 159, 164, 165 methodology 40, 79, 80, 174, 176 Metz, Christian 32, 35, 40 see also apparatus milieu 12, 37, 39, 40, 72, 74, 97, 113, 126, 131, 141-145, 149, 152-156, 159, 160, 161, 164, 166, 167, 172, 175 milieu associé (associated milieu) 152-160, 162-165, 167 of desire 141, 167 milieux 22, 33, 145 mise-en-scène 95, 103, 163 mnesic traces 68, 71-73 modes of existence 8, 12, 14, 57, 82, 105, 134, 142, 143, 145, 172, 174, 175 dispersive and penetrating 40, 41, 142, 143, 145, 168 modulation 12, 13, 40, 57, 59, 61, 81, 82, 89 definition 80 of time 52, 62, 65, 66

190  spatial modulation 39, 104, 105 technical modulation 23 see also zones of modulation Mondloch, Kate 30, 31, 63n45 montage 55, 64 Moody, Ken 112, 117, 118, 128 moving-image making 23, 33, 156, 159, 160, 171-173, 175 moving images 15, 19, 26, 30, 31, 33, 54, 63-65, 149 multi-media 18, 21, 23, 53, 54, 144, 148, 149, 152, 152 museum 9, 15, 29, 40, 52-54, 56, 83, 84, 88-90, 110-112, 150, 153, 160, 162, 173 Centre Pompidou 18, 23, 28, 53, 54, 85, 88, 89, 156, 161 museum exhibition 52, 83, 162 Museum of Modern Art 40, 89, 110 Muñoz, José Esteban 13, 14 see also performativity narcissism 39, 141, 142, 143, 163, 164, 167 see also aesthetics; Rosalind Krauss narratives 8, 10, 13, 40, 41, 54, 79, 82, 84, 93, 109, 136, 149 alternative narratives 10, 82, 146 concomitant narratives 8, 41, 171 native informant 40, 79, 92, 93, 97 definition 91 see also Spivak, Gayatri networked societies 15, 74, 174 networked machines 129, 134-135 objectivity 36, 163 ontology 81, 89, 126 operations 7, 10, 11, 13, 16, 23, 24, 26, 29, 31, 35, 37, 38, 39, 48-51, 64, 74, 81, 82, 104,113, 114-116, 120, 121, 127, 129, 130, 134, 135, 137, 173-176 operations of capture 121 operations in space 26 operations of time 26, 59 temporal operations 51, 64, 75 Paik, Nam 27, 28, 51 Panopticon 127, 128, 144, 147 see also Bentham, Jeremy; Foucault, Michel Parfait, Françoise 62, 86 Paris 7, 9, 18, 19, 53, 85, 88, 91, 97n63, 99, 101, 144-47, 160 Parisi, Luciana 12, 17, 50 see also performing entities perception 31, 56, 65, 69, 132, 157, 159, 164, 168, 172 viewer’s 13, 64 audio-visual perception 38 human perception 49, 72, 73, 118 object of perception 59 perception-consciousness 68, 70,

Performative Images

sensory perception 62, 75, 121, 131 technologized perception 54 performance 23-25, 119, 129, 162 technology and 8, 16, 34, 37, 75, 94, 156 performance art 11, performance studies 13, 14, 83, 172, 176 performativity 13, 28, 130, 172 definition 92 see also Muñoz, José Esteban performer 94, 97, 98, 110-112, 117, 119, 162 male performer 110, 118 performing entities 12 see also Parisi, Luciana phenomenology 36, 37, 89 see also Merleau-Ponty philosophy of technology 7, 34, 176 political agenda 121, 122, 124, 128, 133, 135, 173 political minorities 24, 155 power 13, 14, 17, 21, 32-35, 48, 49, 60, 79, 81, 82, 84, 90, 93, 95, 96, 103, 111n8, 113, 116, 122, 126, 128, 132-136, 142, 144, 155, 165, 172, 173, 175 ambivalent power 10, 81, 85 powerlessness 103, 112, 125 pre-emptive power 11, 39, 116, 132 pre-emption 50, 113, 126, 127, 133 pre-emptive models 40, 109 premature death 41, 109, 112, 113, 118, 121, 127, 135 see also Gilmore, Ruth presence 9, 11, 12, 19, 25, 28, 29, 35, 37, 40, 59, 82, 84, 93, 99, 102, 112, 120, 121, 141, 146 audience/viewer/spectator 61-63, 89, 143, 149, 150, 152, 158, 160, 163 bodily presence 8, 23, 101 programmability 48, 74, 135 programmed life 40, 109, 112, 113, 121, 135 programmed significance 15, 166 prosthetic memory 52, 73 aphaeretic memory 72-74 prégnance 12, 35 see also presence psyche 32, 70n66, 72, 142 psychological model 40, 141-43, 145, 158, 164 self-encapsulation 142, 143, 150 see also Krauss, Rosalind racialized body 12, 40, 83, 109, 115, 116, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 135 racialized technesis, 109, 112 racism 109, 113, 116, 122, 123, 126, 128, 129, 131, 135 definition 112 Rancière, Jacques 18, 38 recorders 17, 19, 23, 24, 60, 146 reflexive medium 27, 28, 155 regime 49, 56, 75, 114, 119, 120, 121, 127, 129, 131, 133, 146, 147, 166, 167 regime of the image 7, 11, 176 regime of truth 33, 37

191

Index

spatial regime 83 visual regime 23 representation 12, 24, 25, 26, 28, 34, 55, 58, 60, 61, 62, 82, 83, 85-87, 91-93, 118, 119, 124, 125, 126, 132, 144, 155, 157, 162-168 dominant structure of representation 40, 79, 80, 84 representational practices 10, 172 definition 35 representational space 65, 116 reproduction 33, 38, 54, 55, 92, 152 rhythm 51, 66, 94, 95, 158, 162, 163 Roussopoulos, Carole 15, 20, 21, 27, 146, 147, Rouvroy, Antoinette 11n11, 15n26, 17, 40, 109, 114, 126, 133-35. see also algorithmic governmentality; Big Data ideology Sandoval, Chela 40, 79, 80, 88, 95, 96, 99 see also topography Sedira, Zineb 15, 20, 27, 40, 79, 82-84, 101-103 signification 16, 39, 58, 80, 83, 87, 95, 101, 103, 114, 149, 150, 175 see also a-signification Simondon, Gilbert 12n14, 34, 75, 80, 81, 113, 152, 153, 155 see also creative synthesis; individuation social inequalities 33, 129 society of control 33 see also Deleuze, Gilles sociogenesis 34, 74 sovereignty 9, 14, 80, 115 space-critical dimension 84, 103 definition 101 space-critical medium 79, 96 time-critical 31 spatial modulation 12, 39, 83, 104, 105 spatiality 26, 32, 82, 90 see also Mondloch, Kate spectator 21, 23, 25, 28, 29, 88, 92, 96, 99, 110, 117, 145, 156, 161 spectatorship 18, 62 Spielmann, Yvonne 27, 28, 51, 155 see also image technician Spivak, Gayatri 40, 79, 91, 92, 97 see also native informant split-screens 64, 99 Stiegler, Bernard 18n34, 34, 36, 38, 39, 47, 52-57, 65, 123 see also analogico-digital image; idiotext; technique stillness 144, 145, 149, 150, 159 street protests 15, 19, 173 subjectivation 114, 131, 135 see also Althusser, Louis; Fanon, Franz subjectivities 12, 25, 31, 47, 88, 89, 92, 111, 112, 127-135, 167 subjects 12, 26, 37, 39, 41, 48, 79, 80, 87, 88, 89, 90, 100, 109, 111, 131, 142

sublimation 39, 176 subversive practices 9, 84, 167 subversive images 40, 79, 97 subversive dimension 91, 92 surveillance 8, 19, 38, 112, 113, 115, 121, 122, 127, 132, 134, 148 racialization and 12, 128 surveillance studies 40, 109 surveillance technology 16, 39, 120, 129, 144, 173 Tan, Fiona 79, 82-85, 101 technical image 87, 150, 168 see also Flusser, Vilém technical object 10, 19, 55, 62, 74, 75, 86, 112, 121, 136, 137, 152-58 technical memory 51, 54 technicity 12, 13, 27, 34, 145, 152, 159, 173 technique 12n14, 14, 15, 49, 50, 54-57, 59, 64, 66, 68, 74, 113, 115, 122, 133, 134, 152, 174 culture and 18, 28, 34, 48, 52, 71, 75, 172 philosophy of 13, 65 see also Derrida, Jacques; Stiegler, Bernard technique of the imaginary 32, 40 see also Metz, Christian technological milieu 39, 141, 143 technological experimentation 12, 19 technological operation 116, 120 technological transition 10, 16 technoscape 74, 75 television 13, 18n34, 19-23, 36, 48, 49, 51, 55, 59n34, 119, 142, 152, 155, 168, 175 temporalities 8, 26, 30-32, 49-53, 55, 65, 66, 74, 86, 88, 89, 94, 101, 133, 159 tertiary retention 49, 74 time-image 33, 51 movement-image 33 volume-image 47, 50-52, 65, 66, 74 see also Gilles, Deleuze tombeau 58, 59 topography 40, 72, 79, 80 cultural topography 85, 87 topography of consciousness in opposition 80, 88, 99 see also Sandoval, Chela traceability 115, 127 transduction 11, 14, 174 transformation 14, 21, 35, 61, 95, 159, 160 transgression 161, 163 transition 10, 14, 16, 34 triptych 59n34, 102, 110, 111, 118 unity 66, 153, 156, 157, 165, 166 utterance 11, 37, 66, 83, 84, 87, 135, 172 Van Assche, Christine 24n49, 103, 161n39 videography 34, 39, 55, 175 videogram 39, 47, 51, 56, 67, 71, 72 definition 55 see also Kuntzel, Thierry

192  video installation 8, 10, 15, 23, 24, 26, 28-31, 40, 56, 60, 63, 64, 85-88, 90, 91, 102, 110, 116, 119, 122, 142, 143, 145, 146, 153, 160, 164, 166 videology 173-75 video-object 11, 12, 16-20, 24, 28-30, 36, 37, 52, 56, 61, 62, 66, 70, 71, 104, 105, 143, 147 definition 35 video practices 7, 70, 81-83 viewer 8, 9, 13, 16, 24, 25, 63, 66, 82, 83, 84-88, 90, 94, 96, 97, 99-103, 105, 111, 116-20, 145, 147, 149, 150, 157, 160-66, 172 perception and 64, 71 presence and 62, 89, 143 viewing subject 25, 29, 64, 65, 68 visual culture 40, 79, 101 visual studies 142, 168

Performative Images

volume-image 48, 51, 52, 65-67, 74 definition 50 white subjectivities 88, 89 women inmates 147, 154 women’s jail 141, 144, 147 writing pad 12, 67-72 Yalter, Nil 15, 20, 40, 80, 82-84, 101, 141, 143-48 see also body zone of contact 51, 61-63, 67, 71 see also Kuntzel, Thierry zones of modulation 79, 83, 84, 88, 93, 94, 99, 101, 104